Читать книгу: «The Trickster»
MURIEL GRAY
The Trickster
HarperVoyager an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Muriel Gray 1994, 2015
Introduction © Mark Millar 2015
Cover photograph © Sverrir Thorolfsson Iceland/Getty Images
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008158248
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008134730
Version: 2015-10-14
For
Hamish MacVinish Barbour
and Hector Adam Barbour.
With love.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface to the 20th anniversary edition
Introduction
Chapter 1: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 54
Chapter 55: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Keep Reading
Furnace: Chapter 1
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also By the Author
About the Publisher
Preface to the 20th anniversary edition
Here’s a confession. If The Trickster had been written today instead of twenty years ago it would probably be a much lazier book. There was no internet in 1994. Well, there was a sort of internet. It was called ‘a library’.
The story grew after a two-month winter stay in the Canadian Rockies, in and around the Alberta town of Banff, named after the Aberdeenshire town by the Scots who built the great railway that opened up Western Canada to the world. That fascinating historical connection, combined with the local Native Canadian lore and backdrop of fiercely beautiful, unforgiving mountain landscape, would set any imagination alight. And it did.
The history of the Canadian Pacific Railway alone is enough to fill a whole library of books, as indeed it has, as I discovered when I set out to find more, poring over volumes in Glasgow’s grand Mitchell Library.
But as the story evolved around the native people, whose land this had been long before the Scots and their Chinese labourers arrived to lay iron rails through previously unnavigable wilderness, it was clear there was only one way to gather accurate information. Go back and talk to them.
I was warned by local non-native Canadians that trying to gain access to the Stoney Indian Tribe, whose First Nation reserve lies to the east of Banff by the small town of Cochrane, was all but impossible. Wary of outsiders, with a depressing range of serious social problems, these were not people who would be instantly eager to share tales of their ancestors with a stranger from Scotland.
But since the clan motto ‘Hold Fast Craigellachie’ was the telegram sent to the team leader nearing exhaustion during the railway construction’s most challenging section, it seemed right to follow suit.
To meet a reserve resident you make a date and a place, and then you go and wait. They don’t turn up. Well, they do. They watch you from afar. And if you keep coming back at the right time and the right place then eventually they come too.
It took nearly two weeks. Same place, same time, every single day. And then suddenly, one day I was in. My guide was a young woman, Co-Co Powderface, a champion barrel-rider and hunter. We talked and talked. We visited her home, a corrugated iron hand-built house, the tiny shack of her grandmother, a non-English speaker, and the surprise was that everything about it was resonant of lives I’d seen as a child in Scotland, when travelling in the Outer Hebrides and the far north Highlands. Strangely familiar territory.
Over the days we spent with Co-Co, her grandmother, through translation, told tales of shape shifting, of travelling hundreds of miles in minutes, of the spirits and their lives, and miserably, of darker things in their community, horribly real and human and indisputable.
So it’s to her, her family and her people I dedicate this new edition. Had I been able to travel there by clicking the internet, to browse through their myths and legends, idly gaze at photographs of First Nations reserves and forums about cultural practices and problems, I would never have had the privilege of meeting them.
Twenty years seems a long time ago. But just think. To something dark, something ancient, evil and indestructible, something that existed on earth long before the first fish crawled from the sea on its journey to evolve into mankind, it would seem no more than the sideways blink of an eye.
Muriel Gray, 2015
Introduction
I’m very suspicious of people who read introductions.
In my experience the writer’s name in big, chunky letters is all I really need to pick up a book. If it’s a writer I don’t recognize, I’ll impulse buy on a title or a blurb or, if I’m being especially reckless, a beautifully painted cover. But if you’re still unsure whether or not to immerse yourself in the story ahead and need a further thousand words to completely convince you, then let me reassure even the most cautious buyer …
This is the best decision you’ve made lately and you’re in for an absolute treat.
Let’s go back in time ten years to when I first met Muriel Gray. No, scratch that. Turn the dial a further ninety degrees, crank up the handle and send your George Pal-era time machine back a full three decades and she’s starting her career as the coolest thing on the coolest show on television. She’s a presenter on the legendary music programme, The Tube, interviewing pretty much everyone you’ve ever heard of; fast-forward and she’s a kind of a famous TV producer and Britain’s most well-known mountain-climber and a member of the board at Glasgow School of Art (where she’s DOCTOR Muriel Gray) and an award-winning newspaper columnist and former rector of Edinburgh University. Oh, she’s also the patron of several Scottish charities, a respected art historian, an architecture buff, a professional illustrator, a marathon runner, a wife, a mother and a hugely successful business-woman too, in case you didn’t get the memo.
So when I first met Muriel ten years back and discovered she had a double life as a hugely successful horror novelist with three bestselling books to her name and deified by no less than Mister Stephen Edwin King of Portland, Maine, it really didn’t come as too much of a surprise.
The British are naturally suspicious of polymaths and we’re generally right. It’s hard enough to be wonderful at one thing and close to impossible to be brilliant at everything. Yet Muriel kind of is. Oh, and lest ye worry she’s jumping on some kind of genre gravy train when everyone is keen to flash their geek credentials let me assure you she’s very much the real deal. In an era where Hollywood pours money over precisely the kind of creative types they shunned and mocked for years, to the point where the word ‘Ferd’ has been created to identify ‘fake-nerds’, Muriel’s knowledge and love of all things horror is very close to unparalleled. This is a woman who knows her HP Lovecraft from her MR James and will liberally drop names like Machen, Matheson or Algernon Blackwood into even the most casual of dinner conversations. She’s as comfortable at a horror and fantasy convention in the rainy south-east of England as in a BBC studio in Television Centre, possibly even more so. You see, this is what she REALLY wanted to do while she was winning at all the amazing things she’s perhaps better known for and, trust me, it shows.
I remember sitting down to read The Trickster with that slight trepidation when you’re friends with the author. Two pages in and I was forty pages in. A hundred pages in and I was finished. How did that happen? It was so good I genuinely started Furnace the following day and finished off the week with the third of her excellent horror trio, The Ancient. Muriel is such a natural, her writing style so easy, that I can’t believe she hasn’t dipped her toe in these murky waters for precisely 1.5 decades. The Trickster was every weather-beaten paperback, every old comic book, every cult horror movie and every videotaped Hammer House of Horror she had ever stored away in the back of her brain and it literally exploded from her head into ours. She’d trained for it her entire life and she seemed to have a ball. I did too and, trust me, so will you as you read about Sam Hunt and his mysterious heritage and the thing beneath the mountains and all these terrible blackouts he’s been having at precisely the same time all these interesting corpses are showing up. Why in the name of Great Jehovah has this woman not written a horror novel in fifteen years? Why are you reading this introduction when there’s a monster of a book on the other side of the next page?
So if you only know Muriel from TV or radio or a familiar face up a Scottish mountain or that lady with the spiky blonde hair who sits across from you at the School of Art board meetings then you haven’t really, truly met the real her. This book in your hands is the closest thing to the Muriel her friends know and love and, to be honest, I’m slightly jealous you’re only just discovering what she’s really all about in this spanking new edition you’re holding right now.
She really is brilliant at everything, but the books, I would suggest, are her finest achievement and if you’re familiar with her in any way at all you’ll know that is a pretty damn fine recommendation.
Now stop reading the introduction. Turn the page and enjoy yourself.
Mark Millar
Glasgow, 2015
1
Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
When he screamed, his lips slid so far up his teeth that the rarely exposed gum looked like shiny, flayed meat. Hunting Wolf’s eyes flicked open and stared. There was a semicircle of faces above him. Silent. Watching.
For a moment he stayed perfectly still, allowing himself to regain the feeling of being inside his body, that dull ache of reality after the lightness of the spirit’s escape. Then the numbing cold of the snow beneath his naked back stabbed at his skin, and mocked him with the knowledge that he was firmly back in the realm of the flesh.
Sweat was still trickling down his breast, beads of moisture clinging to his brown nipples like decoration, and he stared up at the grey, snow-laden sky in hot despair.
The faces looked on. They would not step forward to touch him or help him in this state. The shaman’s trance was sacred and they had no way of knowing when it would be over.
But it was over, now. He had looked into the thing’s face. Oh, Great Spirit, he had. And the filthy darkness, the bottomless malice he had seen there, had been nearly impossible to bear.
The white men gathered by the mountain were insane. He had seen that, too. Their madness, their folly.
And what could he do?
The shaman got up from the ground with a swiftness that surprised his audience of watchers, and walked away. The faces regarded him for a moment, and then, one by one, followed.
2
‘The living rock.’
If Wesley Martell had caught the look his engineer threw him, he might have regretted the remark. As it was, he shifted his huge bulk in the conductor’s chair, leaned a flabby arm, its hand dimpled like a baby’s, on the sill of the cab window and said it again.
‘Yes indeed. Liiiviiing rock.’
Joshua Tennent, to whom the remark was principally addressed, returned his gaze to the track in front of them, his forefinger caressing the throttle handle as though it could make toast of his corpulent colleague. As the mouth of the first tunnel slid into view from behind a cliff crusted by aquamarine ice, Joshua felt panic mash his guts again.
How many times had he done this, for Christ’s sake? He’d pulled freight back and forwards through the Corkscrew Tunnel for nearly three years, and just because of one foolish, possibly imagined incident, he found himself nearly caking his shorts like a toddler every time that black arch yawned in front of him.
He’d guessed Martell would have a go, could tell by the way he had shifted eagerly in his seat as they’d climbed up the approach to Wolf Mountain. Joshua had hoped the lump of lard would doze illegally until they reached Silver, but he’d been alert and beady-eyed for miles. Those two serpentine tubes of blackness lay between them and town, and the conductor wasn’t in the mood for regulation-breaking sleep.
Joshua thought it best to ignore the bastard. Martell wasn’t the first to twist the knife and he wouldn’t be the last. Concentrating on smothering his fear was labour enough for now.
The conductor peeked across at his white-faced engineer, as he slapped the shoulder of the third occupant of the cab, a sullen brakeman called Henry. He gesticulated grandly towards Joshua, his two rodent-like eyes narrowing into slits of mirth.
‘Look, Henry. Hoghead’s got the jimmy-shits again ’bout goin’ through the Corkscrews.’
The brakeman disregarded both the slap and the remark, answering only with a barely perceptible upward movement of his head, the reverse of a nod. Martell was undeterred. This shift had bored the balls off him, with the brakeman sitting motionless and silent in front of him, his big ears sticking out like one of those Easter Island heads Martell had seen in a magazine once. And this damn engineer had no conversation either. Wasn’t much to ask that a man could expect a bit of parley at his work, instead of watching speechless as three hundred miles of Canadian Pacific track snaked beneath them in the snow.
There was nearly a mile of train behind them. Being in charge of a hundred cars of coal rumbling slowly across Canada meant big-time responsibility to Wesley Martell. He often pictured how his train looked from the air, a giant metal caterpillar picking its way through the mountains, the engine like the insect’s head, and himself, CP conductor, Martell, the brains in that head. This mile of hardware stopped, started or stayed at his say-so, and that made him feel good; made him more of a man than those jockeys braying into portable phones you saw on the sidewalks in Vancouver. No kid was ever going to look at those guys with big, wide, jealous eyes when they went about their business, least not the way they looked up at him in his cab, when he hi-balled his monster load through a station waving down at them like an oily Father Christmas.
But Martell didn’t get to be conductor, the big cheese on this buggy, without expecting a crumb of respect from his crew. Part of that respect was the civility to pass the time, jaw a little.
Seemed like this crew didn’t know the meaning of the word respect, sitting there like two dumb fucks, lost in their own dumb thoughts.
Wesley Martell didn’t much like to be left alone with his thoughts: too much track gazing and those thoughts had the habit of chucking up things he’d rather not meet again, thanks. Especially on a night haul, when the lights of the train illuminated a few yards of the track ahead, making it dance and gyrate on the edge of darkness like something alive. No, he’d rather talk. Talk was life. Silence was a kind of death, and he’d had enough silence on this journey.
Ten miles back Henry had said something to Joshua that Martell didn’t catch, and apart from that, nothing. Not a sound except the clacking of the wheels on the track and the throaty roar of the engine. So when the Corkscrew Tunnel rolled round, Martell took his shot.
Back at the depot, Joshua and his tunnels were the butt of an endless running joke amongst the local crews, and Martell was damned if he wasn’t going to use anything he could to get a little spark into this seven-hour bitch of a shift.
Joshua was still, quiet, and white. He had it coming.
‘Best keep a hand on that throttle, engineer. Think I saw something movin’ in there.’ He threw his head back and wheezed out a guffaw.
He laughed alone, but Henry turned his head slightly towards Martell before returning to gaze vacantly out of the window.
Joshua could feel his hands turning clammy. It wasn’t hard to ignore the fat guy. Ever since he’d confided in some brakemen from Toronto what had happened to him that day in the tunnel, he’d taken a ribbing that was now so obligatory it had practically entered the Canadian Railway Operating Rules Book.
What was hard, and getting harder every time they came through, was trying to resist jamming the dynamic brake handle on and jumping out of the train cab into the snow, before the three men and those hundred cars of grade one coal were launched into the gaping black mouth.
Funny to think that right now, on the wooden viewing platform up on the highway, tourists would be yelping to each other like excited coyotes, at spotting a freight train about to go through the famous tunnels. It was a Kodak-moment, all right: with a train as long as this one, the onlookers would see the engine disappear into the first tunnel, then double back on itself, only to appear to be travelling in the opposite direction to its freight before entering the second tunnel. There was a big painted illustration up on that platform for the real dumb tourists, the ones who stumbled out of a Winnebago and couldn’t figure out where they were, never mind what they were seeing.
Joshua had stopped on the highway once to look at the sign. It told him in kiddie-speak letters that they had blasted into the mountain ninety years ago, using the spiral design to avoid a wicked gradient through Wolf Pass. There were shitty pencil drawings of pioneers with big hats and moustaches, and a lot of bull about the early days of railway, but at least there was a diagram of how the tunnels worked inside the mountain. That was neat. You could see exactly how the Corkscrew worked, how it quartered the gradient with those two curly holes in the hill. Joshua had never thought about it much before then, and he didn’t think about it much after either. That is, until he had his fright.
It didn’t matter how many times he went over it in his head. He’d lain awake at nights in the CP bunkhouses and at home in Stoke, trying to figure out why he’d gotten scared. Worst thing was, it was a whole year ago, almost exactly this time last winter, and the scare hadn’t worn off.
Martell could go shaft himself. Joshua would tolerate all the fat fingers in the world poking him in the ribs, if he could just shake free of this paralysing, childish fear. He began to run through it again, the way he did every time they passed this way, trying to flush the memory away, make it safe.
The way he remembered it, they’d come through the lower tunnel, the engine just entering the second, when the End-to-Train unit had gone apeshit. There was a hot box back there and nothing for it but to stop. With the gradient they had to negotiate coming up before the higher tunnel, the last thing they needed was a car with screaming white-hot axles dragging behind them. Joshua recalled whistling through his teeth with exasperation as the whole damn hulk screeched to a halt and conductor and brakeman got up from their chairs and stretched their legs.
The boxes had stopped out there in the gorge, sitting in the thin wintry sunlight, leaving the cab of the engine about fifty yards into the tunnel, and Joshua knew he had to get back there and investigate. Barney the brakeman handed Joshua a thick black rubber torch with one hand and put the kettle on the hot plate with the other, saying clearly without words that the engineer would have their assistance when they were good and ready.
It was the delay that had pissed off Joshua. Just the time it was going to take to check it all out and put it right. It had been his homeward shift, taking him back to Beat River and Mary’s bed, a heavenly prospect after five nights in the bunkhouses, lying beside guys in their pits, snoring like they were sawing logs. He remembered thinking two things. The first was that at least it was lucky the cars had stopped outside the tunnel, and the second thought, like it had come from nowhere, was ‘the living rock’. Three innocent words, just sitting there doing nothing, going nowhere, meaning little. But there.
He took the torch and saluted sarcastically to Barney as he opened the cab door and left.
As he climbed down out of the huge red DRF30, Joshua touched the hand rail with an ungloved hand. Cold metal that has just rolled through the passes between the Alberta Rockies in minus twenty is not welcoming to naked flesh, and Joshua’s fingers stuck fast, forcing him to breathe on them to release his hand. It stung like crazy as it relinquished his grip and with a curse he sheathed it in a leather work gauntlet.
It was the only time he’d ever stopped in the tunnels, and yes, compared to the cement-lined tunnels that ran under the highways on the east coast, the rock was alive all right. So much for ‘a feat of grand engineering’. Seemed like the guys had just blasted the sucker and left. The walls and ceiling surprised him with their unhewn crudity, something he had never perceived by the weak light of the cab as they’d passed through here a hundred times. Ice hung from every crack in thin savage spikes and sporadically coated the rock-face with vast, glistening bulbous sheets.
And everything was dark ahead of the engine. Really dark. The curve of the tunnel meant that you could only ever see one entrance at a time. In fact, there was a point, right in the middle of the tunnel’s arc, where you couldn’t see any light at all; but he didn’t care to think of that right now. His breath billowed up in front of his face like steam, partially obscuring his view of the sunlit opening ahead each time he exhaled.
He should have been thinking about how they were going to get to the maintenance yard forty kilometres away without too much damage or time loss: he should have been thinking like an engineer. But he wasn’t. All he could hear, echoing in his head as though his skull were a tunnel, were the words, the living rock, the living rock.
He hadn’t needed the torch for the first few yards, the walls being lit by the cab interior, but by the time he drew level with the first car, Joshua had to use it, picking his way along the track trying not to pratfall over the sleepers half-buried in gravel. The arch of sunlight was clear ahead, its illumination extending barely a few feet into the dark, and already he was starting to regret he hadn’t insisted that Barney come with him. He touched the walkie-talkie hanging on his hip, annoyed that it hadn’t crackled into life. Clearly his two crew companions were treating this like a break instead of a breakdown. He was tempted to press ‘talk’ and shout horse’s ass at them as he passed the second car just to remind them he was there, but realized grimly that it wasn’t irritation making him keen to summon them, but apprehension. His hand left the radio, unclipped the ear flaps on his cap and let them fall. Joshua Tennent was suddenly very cold.
It wasn’t so much a noise he heard, more the feeling of a noise. That is, he sensed there was something scraping in the rock above him. Not scraping on the surface, like a bat or a chipmunk, but scraping inside the rock as if the stone itself was shifting, turning in its sleep.
But he didn’t hear it. He felt it. The tunnel was not silent: the idling engine hissed and clanked, dripped and cracked at random as he progressed along its metal flanks. Any rustling in the tunnel would have to work hard to make itself heard above the cacophony.
Even now, he still couldn’t say which sense was being alerted, but the memory of the feeling was pungent.
At first he ignored it. How could you feel a noise? Walking on, he realized that he hadn’t breathed for about six or seven seconds and corrected the oversight with a cloud of vapour. He struggled to free his body from that atavistic state of standby every child adopts in the darkened bedroom when they hear a creak from a floorboard; breath held, eyes wide open, body still and ready to flee. But why was he on red alert? There was nothing to fear in this situation, except the diminishing drinking time in Stoke, and the wrath of Mary, who even now would be soaking in a bath reeking of something made from coconut or peach.
He felt it again. It was above him, he was sure of that. Something stirring in the rock above the ceiling. But no, that wasn’t right. It was the rock in the ceiling itself that was stirring, moving above him like iron filings attracted to his magnet.
Joshua wanted to run then. He wanted to run very badly indeed. But from what? There was no sound, for God’s sake, nothing to hear but the train. If he gave in to his instincts, how would he explain to Barney or the conductor why he ran flailing along the track, stumbling into the sunlight like a fool? He kept that picture close as he walked more quickly towards the tunnel mouth, making himself visualize Barney’s face as he described how a sound ‘felt’.
‘You bin drinkin’ meths?’ he would say for sure. Barney’s favourite joke. A joke he used on anything he didn’t agree with, understand or like.
(Union official tells him there’s an overtime ban.
‘You bin’ drinkin’ meths?’
Wife tells him it’s time he got up off his fat fanny and put the trash out …
‘You bin drinkin’ meths?’)
You see Barney, you couldn’t hear it exactly, you could only feel it …
‘You bin drinkin’ …’
Enough. He would walk on like an adult and fix that fucking car. The sooner it was done, the sooner he’d be downing a cold one in The Deerbrush, with Mary perched beside him on a stool. He was only three cars away from the sun, and whatever else his heart was saying, his head was saying there is no noise. He had looked back then and been surprised by how far away the lights of the cab seemed.
All the way back into the tunnel Barney would be standing looking at the kettle with his hands in his pocket. All the way back there the conductor would be fishing down the back of his chair for his dog-eared novel. All the way back there the rock was still living. Joshua stopped breathing again and stood still. The noise, the feeling, halted with him. He waited. It waited. Then, it happened.
Like a released pinball, the noise, the feeling, concealed in its ceiling of rock, shot away from Joshua with a velocity that made him dizzy. He knew it was something alive, and he knew it was travelling the whole length of the tunnel’s arc to the other entrance. There was a fraction of a pause, the fraction of a pause you expect when something thrown very hard is bouncing off its wall. The pause before it starts to come right back at you.
It was darkness, and it was rushing up the tunnel towards him like water forced through a pipe. Again he felt it first, reeling from its shock-waves as they pushed him back towards the entrance. But when he saw it, the natural black of the tunnel’s sunlessness being obscured by a deeper blackness impossible to comprehend, he remembered to breathe. As the black tide swallowed up the cab of the train, breaking over it like a wave, he turned and ran, his legs buckling and floundering beneath him. He had to make the entrance. There was no doubt about that at all. Instinct had told his logic to shut the fuck up and run, and instinct was telling him that if that wall of rushing blackness reached him before he reached the light, he would never feel the sun on his face again.
He ran like a child, making involuntary grunting sounds as his feet gouged the gravel, chin high, eyes rolling in their sockets.
When he fell out of the tunnel gulping for breath, the last thing he remembered was the darkness slamming into the entrance, as though the man-made arch described an invisible prison door. He was sure the darkness screamed with fury. No sound again, just a visceral reading of a ripping, hungry, scream.
Joshua was sure he had just preserved his sanity. The brakeman and conductor were not so sure. When they found Joshua, he was lying in the snow jabbering, and the best they could get out of him was the living rock.
He was taken home by road and was back at work in a fortnight. The conductor and brakeman filed a report, recalling that there had been a short power cut in the cab at the time that engineer Tennent ran. Yes, they had experienced temporary darkness, and yes, that’s probably what spooked him so bad. No harm done. Everybody safe, and a whole new joke to pass around the bunkhouses now that the one about Joe’s bear encounter had worn thin.
But even now, a whole year on, and after a hundred nudges and grins when Joshua walked into the canteen, each time the Corkscrews loomed he toyed with trading his railway pension for steady work in a hamburger joint.
Martell was still chuckling as the cab entered the tunnel. ‘Rock still livin’, Tennent? Can’t hear no breathin’.’
He wheezed some more in Joshua’s direction, until he realized that neither his brakeman or engineer were going to respond. Martell was starting to get mad. A man making a joke deserves some kind of answer, even if the joke’s an old one. He’d put up with this silence too long.
The dark engulfed them, the yellow light from the cab flickering on the irregular shapes of the rough rock walls, but the entrance to the tunnel was clearly visible ahead.
Martell leaned forward in his chair.
‘Guess you’re keepin’ it shut ’cause you know that whole livin’ rock thing was a crock of shit, Tennent. That right?’
Joshua kept his eyes on the growing arch of light.
‘Guess so, Wesley.’
It was shaking a stick at a steer, a hoghead calling Martell by his first name.
‘Well let’s us just stop in the upper tunnel and check it out. Clear it up for good.’
Joshua dared not look at him. He sat motionless, his throat dry.
‘You heard. Hit the brakes. Now.’
He heard all right. Why not? Joshua knew it would get him one day. Every time he dreamed of that rushing, hungry darkness, he knew it would get him. Why not now? Now was as good a time as any.
Turning slowly to look at Martell, he pulled back the brake and watched the conductor’s florid face as the train began its laborious process of halting.
Forty-five seconds later, they stopped just inside the mouth of the upper tunnel.
Joshua Tennent held his conductor’s eyes in a gaze like a mongoose holding a snake. Martell twitched. Maybe the engineer was really crazy. Maybe this was where he went Charlie Manson and they’d all end up being stencils for a cop’s chalk outline. But then again maybe not. There was face to be saved here, and when all was said and done he was the guy in charge, and crazy or not, Tennent had better understand that, and understand it good.
Henry was open-mouthed, looking from Joshua to Martell and back again, as though the secret of why a substantial portion of BC’s coal supply came to be stationary in the mouth of the upper Corkscrew Tunnel, lay in the air somewhere between them.
‘Want to get out and say hi to the rock?’ The conductor spat the words.
A pause.
‘Sure. After you, Wesley.’
The delay in the reply was deliberate, the tone of voice imitating Joshua. ‘After you, son.’
Joshua stood. It would get him. Of course it would. He would face it now, it would get him, and the thing would be done. Over.
It would be okay. Better than all those bad dreams, and the feeling in those dreams that someday the sunlit arch might not be enough to stop it. His eyes never leaving those of the conductor, he walked to the cab door behind his seat, pushed down the thin aluminium handle, and opened it. Cold air poured in like syrup.
‘Coming? Or are you scared, Wesley?’
Funny thing though, Wesley Martell was scared. He kept thinking about the rock. The living rock. Even though he knew the whole thing was bullshit, his stomach turned a loop at having to walk out that cab door and stand three feet from the craggy wall. But he was still more mad than scared, and if that crazy shit-for-brains hoghead thought he was going to back down now, then he ate loony flakes for breakfast.
‘Oh sure, Tennent. It’s tricklin’ down my legs and fillin’ my boots. But I’m right at your heels, boy.’
Joshua inhaled a lungful of warm cab air and stepped out onto the metal platform to face the rock. Martell was at his side immediately.
Joshua waited. The two men stood silently, their backs to the light of the window, staring at the icy stone. Nothing happened. Joshua closed his eyes. Nothing. The only sound was that of the massive diesel engine chugging beneath a sheath of steel. Martell felt the cold settle on him like a silk cloak.
Joshua opened his eyes, his breast heaving with a mixture of relief and dismay. Did he really imagine it last time? Was he crazy? He’d dreamed of this so many times in the last year, tossing and sweating in his bed as the nightmare darkness swept him away, and yet he knew there was nothing here but rock. He couldn’t ‘feel’ any sound at all.
He looked at Martell with naked contempt. ‘Happy?’
‘Pleased as a baby at the tit. I guess the livin’ rock ain’t home today.’
He squeezed another laugh out of that box of phlegm he stored somewhere under his shirt and kept laughing as they re-entered the cab, closed the door and returned to their chairs.
The throttle opened and the train made a series of metallic screeches of protest as it inched away. It was the deafening noise of the engine that prevented the three men hearing the other sound.
The sound of two six-foot-long icicles shattering as they splintered onto the metal platform where the conductor and engineer had stood.
3
Billy broke the laws of physics every time he yelled. How a holler that loud came to be emitted from such a tiny frame would have given Einstein pause to pull his moustache in thought.
‘It’s coming!’
Sam Hunt made a mock ear-trumpet with his hand and leaned towards his son. ‘Sorry? Didn’t get that.’
Billy’s small oval face looked up at Sam and broke into a grin. ‘Sure you did. Feel. It’s coming now.’
Sam bent into a crouch and laid a palm on the freezing rail. He could feel nothing, but Billy, they both knew, was the expert here.
‘Okay then. Bird or Queen this time?’
Billy was thoughtful. He turned the pale yellow dollar coin over in his mittened hand and made a decision. ‘I’m gonna go for the duck. You put yours Queen-up.’
He leaned forward and placed the dollar on top of the rail track as carefully as if he were handling a rod of plutonium. Sam, smiling, positioned his dollar a yard further up the track, the profile of the Queen of England facing the direction of the oncoming train like she knew what she was in for.
From here on the edge of town you could just make out the entrance of the tunnel, looming above the pines about three miles off, but Sam was damned if he knew how Billy could feel the vibrations of a train that far away. But he did, and here it came, the headlight emerging from the dark hole right on cue.
‘Stand back, Billy.’ Sam stretched a hand out for the boy’s.
‘Aw get real, Dad. That’s not gonna be here for at least five minutes.’
Sam stood up and looked towards the tunnel mouth, his hand still extended to his son. ‘No, you’re right, Billy boy. Why don’t you just lie with your head on the rail, and if it gets cut off at the neck your Mom and I see what we can get for your bike at a jumble sale?’
Billy sighed and rolled his eyes. He stood up and took the large offered hand, and together they moved back from the track. Still holding hands, they squatted on the snowy embankment ten feet away to wait.
From behind the forest came the deep, long, discordant hoot of the train’s horn, filling Silver Valley with a sound so thick it resonated in the spine as well as in the ears. Sam lifted his head like a cat smelling fish.
‘You like that sound, Dad, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I like it too.’
Sam looked down at the face of the boy, framed now in his blue anorak hood, his black eyes glittering in a brown face. ‘What’s it make you think of, Billy?’
The boy looked solemn. ‘You.’
Sam was silent. He tightened his grip on the mitten containing his son’s small hand and resumed gazing up the track.
Billy smiled up at him. ‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘Do I have a choice here?’
The boy giggled, a sound so sweet that Sam thought it might make primroses poke through the snow at their feet. ‘It just sounds like you, that’s all. I don’t know why.’
‘So I sound like a freight train horn, is that what you’re saying? Remind me of that if I’m ever tempted into a Karaoke Bar.’
But he’d lost his son’s attention. Billy had his timing wrong for once. The train was already in sight on the long straight leading into town, and it would be on top of their dollars in about a minute.
Billy yelped like a rodeo MC and jumped to his feet.
‘How big, Dad? How big? What’s the record?’ He was jumping on the spot.
‘Two-and-a-half inches. I think.’
‘Metric, Dad. What’s that in centimetres?’
Sam, legs drawn up to his armpits, his arms flopping lazily over the knees, looked down into the snow and laughed. ‘Got me there, Billy boy. Guess I’m not doing so hot today. Sound like a horn and can’t count modern.’
The rails were singing now as fourteen thousand tons of iron tested their rivets, and when the horn sounded again, father and son nearly felt it blow their hair.
Billy was right. Sam loved that sound. He remembered seeing a small ad in the Silver Valley Weekly that read, ‘Superior condo to let near ski slopes. Off highway and no train noise’ and thinking he wouldn’t much care for that, not if you couldn’t hear the trains. He also knew the advertiser was lying. There was nowhere in Silver, or anywhere in the whole valley for that matter, where you could insulate yourself from that melancholy trumpeting. Not even the grazing elk looked up when it sounded. As far as Sam figured, it was part of the mountains, a sound as natural as the woodpecker or the squirrel, and anyone who wanted a condo where you couldn’t hear it deserved a dunce cap.
The train was on them. They could see the men in the cab, sitting high in the dirty red-and-white-striped metal box. The engine looked like a face, the crew peering out of small windows that made eyes at either side of a huge snout housing the horsepower.
Billy waved up at the big metal face, yelling hopelessly, his voice lost in the roar of the thundering diesel engine, unaware that Sam held the hem at the back of his anorak protectively.
From one of the eyes in the iron face, the flesh-and-blood face of a fat man scowled down at them as the engine rumbled past. No one was going to wave at Billy today. Sam watched his son’s expression turn from excitement to disappointment as the cab slipped away and they faced nothing but a mile of coal cars, shedding ice as the sun got to work on them.
‘He didn’t see us, Dad.’
Sam knew they’d been seen all right. In fact he knew exactly what that fat face had been thinking, as it looked lazily out of its window and fixed its beady eyes on them. But he would do everything in his power to protect Billy from that thought.
‘Guess not. How’re the dollars doin’?’
‘Still there I think. I can see mine. Only about twenty cars to go.’
Man and boy waited patiently, man perhaps more patiently than boy, until the last car rolled by, and they watched the back end of the train slide away.
Billy looked down at Sam, who still squatted in the snow, lost in thought. ‘Can I get ’em?’
‘Yeah. Go for it. Remember they’re hot.’
Billy darted forward to the rail as Sam stood and stretched his six-foot body beneath its down-filled jacket: by the way his son was breathily mouthing, wow, he guessed they’d had a result. He joined him by the track.
‘At least eight centimetres, Dad. Look.’ Billy passed the flattened disc of yellow metal to his father, eyes wide in anticipation of approval as Sam turned the hot trophy over in his gloved hand.
‘Matter that it ain’t exactly round?’
Billy shook his head.
‘Then I guess it’s a record. Official.’
Billy cheered and snatched back the metamorphosed dollar. He ran to where Sam had placed his. ‘Sorry, Dad. Yours slipped.’
True enough. Sam’s dollar had fallen off the track before the train could do its business. He was glad the glory had all been Billy’s but he feigned a little hurt as he pocketed the unchanged coin. ‘Gee. This isn’t my day.’
Billy came up to his father, put his short little arms around Sam’s padded waist and hugged him. ‘I love you, Dad. You can have mine.’
If love could have weight, Sam thought that freight train would have trouble shifting his. He wanted to squeeze his son so hard his muscles ached at the restraint they were under. ‘I love you too, Billy. You keep the dollar. There’ll be plenty more. I’ll beat ya yet.’
Billy broke the hug and ran through the thick snow, stumbling like a cripple to the parked car, making a noise like a train as he went.
Sam looked at the retreating train, the distant sound of its bell clanging as it slowed up through town.
If that driver really had been thinking what Sam suspected, he thought at that moment, he might be inclined to pull the fat bastard from the cab and kill him. But how could Sam know that Wesley Martell was innocent? Martell wasn’t thinking That kid must be crazy if he thinks I’m going to wave at two stinking Indians. In fact Martell hadn’t even noticed them. Nothing had been further from his thoughts.
‘The light you can leave on all day. Light 96 CHFM. Stevie Wonder comin’ up next …’
Sam’s hand couldn’t get to the car stereo off-button fast enough. What the hell did Katie do with his cassettes? The radio would kick in if there was no tape in the player, and even after ten years of marriage, Sam still hadn’t learned to turn the goddamn thing off before he started the ignition. Katie always left the radio on, he should know by now. There were only two stations a car radio could pick up this far into the mountains, both of them beaming in from Calgary, and both of them made Sam long for legislation to shoot disc jockeys. He could just about stomach 107 Kick FM, pumping out dinosaur rock music until the signal broke up, but when Katie had been driving the radio mysteriously tuned itself back to this easy-listening nightmare.
He remembered how once, exasperated, he had turned it off while Katie was singing along to a Lionel Richie song, causing her to tut and smack him on the head, ignoring the fact he was driving. Sam had done a mock swerve. Billy and Jess in the back had laughed hard at that and he’d growled, and asked her why the hell she listened to it.
‘You get a traffic report from Captain Kirk, the chopper pilot.’
‘Yeah, but it’s Calgary traffic. The guy’s flying about above Calgary, Katie. You find it useful, knowing that there’s a tailback on Barlow Trail, when you’re sitting in the car in Silver, two hundred miles away?’
She’d grinned, and hit him on the top of the head again, making his straight black hair flop over his eyes.
‘I like it, okay?’
‘Right. Maybe we can get your parents to tape the traffic reports from Vancouver and mail them over. That would sure make life a fuller all-round experience.’
She’d laughed and put the radio back on. Sam had winced, but out of the corner of his eye he had watched her singing and laughing, and suddenly Light 96 didn’t seem so bad.
Right now, though, it was more than he could stand.
The only solution was his cassettes, but it looked like she’d cleared them away again.
‘Dig in the glovebox, Billy, will you? Any music in there?’
Billy opened it and rummaged around. ‘Nah.’
‘What does she do with them?’
Billy smiled.
‘Help me choose some at the gas station?’
‘Sure.’
Sam turned the car into Silver’s main street and headed for the Petro-Canada. Cruising down the wide street, its verge piled high with wedges of old black snow, always made Sam feel like he was being covered in warm syrup. It was comforting. It was safe. It was also breathtakingly beautiful. At the eastern end of the street Wolf Mountain stabbed into the sky, a pyramid of seemingly impenetrable rock. Since Silver was nearly five thousand feet above sea level, and Wolf Mountain officially eight-and-a-half thousand, the stone cliffs that towered over the town were pushing four thousand feet. But its fortress was a lie. The climber braving those crags would be crestfallen to discover that the mountain was all bravado and had been tamed several times over.
Not only did the railroad run right through its guts, but its gentler western flanks were blanketed with ski trails and restaurants, hiding from the town as though Silver might notice the mountain had gone soft and lose its temper.
But to the non-skiing tourists wandering around the sunny sidewalks, looking in gift shops and killing time until their partners came down off the slopes, Wolf Mountain was picture postcard wilderness.
Sometimes Sam thought the mountain looked like it sealed off the street like a gate, even though it sat at least three miles away from town. In fact the very first night he and Katie spent in Silver together, he’d had a nightmare that he was running, lungs bursting, trying to escape from the town, or something in the town, and the mountain kept blocking his exit with a wall of living rock. Weird dream. Weird, since he loved Silver. And he loved Wolf Mountain.
They turned into the gas station and pulled in to a pump. Vince looked up from the till and waved a solemn greeting to them through the window. Billy leapt out and ran into the shop while Sam watched the pump eating up his dollars. Next time he looked he saw Billy inside, earnestly spinning the cassette rack.
A hand-written sign on top of the carousel read, Truck drivers’ delight. All country tapes half-price. This week only. We must be crazy!!!
Vince sure was making a mark on his patch. The customer might always be right, but as far as Vince was concerned the customer must also be blind. Day-glo stickers alerting the driver to the great offers now available in everything from mufflers to coffee speckled the interior and exterior of his booth like a fungus.
A woman waiting in the Chrysler New Yorker in front of Sam’s old Toyota was obviously unimpressed by Vince’s style. She glared at the man paying Vince inside, her face pinched and her eyes narrowed behind wire-rimmed spectacles. Sam smiled over as her gaze wandered in his direction, but the smile faded on his lips as she returned his greeting with a look of distaste. Second time today, he thought. You put out and you get nothing back. He was grateful that this time it was him getting the cold shoulder and not Billy. Sam looked in the booth to check out which poor sucker had to share not only the car but his life with the old snake.
There was a guy in a felt hat at the counter, who kept glancing back at Billy while Vince worked at his credit card. He mouthed a sentence to Vince and laughed. Vince smiled, then caught sight of Sam watching him. Vince saw something in Sam’s eyes and averted his gaze. The customer picked up the paperwork and left the shop.
Billy was still spinning the cassette rack when Sam came in to pay.
‘Anything?’
Billy looked thoughtful. ‘Whitney Houston?’
Sam made a fanning motion in front of his face like he was wafting away a bad smell.
Billy rolled his eyes and resumed his search, as Sam walked over to the desk.
‘How’s it going, Sam?’
‘Good. Good.’
‘Twenty-eight dollars.’
Sam fished the bills out of his wallet. ‘What did that guy say about Billy, Vince?’
‘What guy?’
Sam jerked a thumb in the direction of the man strapping himself into the Chrysler beside the wicked witch of the east.
Vince looked out. ‘Aw nothing. Just passing the time of day. Tourist.’ He held his hand out for the money. Sam put the bills on the counter.
‘What did he say?’
Vince sighed. ‘He said, am I getting old or are truck drivers getting younger? Funny guy, huh?’
‘That was it?’
‘That was it.’
Sam looked into Vince’s eyes and was confused by the message there. Vince picked up the money and opened the till.
‘Need a receipt?’
‘No. Thanks.’
Billy joined them, his head barely making it over the counter, his hand clutching a cellophane-wrapped cassette.
‘Okay, what about this one? Kenny Rogers.’
Sam put a hand on his son’s head, still looking at the man behind the till, and tried to repair the damage. ‘Jesus, Vince, your taste in music stinks.’
‘We aim to please.’
‘Catch you later. Give my regards to Nancy.’
‘Will do.’
‘Billy. Put back that box from Hell.’
Billy complied and they left the shop.
They had driven fifty yards before Sam spoke again. ‘What did that guy in the shop say to Vince? You know, the guy that was in before me?’
Billy was singing to himself looking out of the window. He stopped singing, and smiled up at Sam. ‘He said was he getting old or were truck drivers getting younger? He was meaning me.’ Billy giggled again. ‘Imagine thinking a nine-year-old kid was a truck driver. Just ’cause I was looking through the cassettes.’ He laughed again, and then got back to the busy task of singing to himself.
Sam felt sick. What the hell was wrong with him? That shit-kicking train driver had thrown him off balance by not returning Billy’s wave. Why did Sam have to look for prejudice where there was none? He was going to have to learn to trust.
Silver was a nice town. It was full of nice people. Sam thought he should maybe write that out a hundred times when he got like this. Stop him getting so cranky.
Yeah. It was full of really nice people.
He turned the radio on.
‘… not too hard, not too soft, just light. This is Daniel, Elton John …’
Truth. Silver was a nice town. Regular population eight thousand, twice that when the seasonal tourists poured in.
In summer they came in camper vans, bringing the main street to a standstill while the passengers peered at maps and pointed, and the drivers constantly wheeled round in their seats, either shouting at kids in the back or looking for somewhere to park like predators stalking game. They were a pain in the butt.
They turned the town into a zoo.
Winter, right now, was better. Skiers travelled by car or on tour buses, and somehow they weren’t so cheesy, didn’t wear so many shiny leisure suits, didn’t picnic in dumb places.
But then the winter trade was altogether different. Even the Japanese who skied all season, wearing identical white ski-suits like Elvis’s last days in Vegas, were different from the packs that roamed Silver in the summer. The summer Japanese were on tours, herded around by fierce guides, photographing pretty much anything their diminutive leader pointed at. The winter ones came in couples. They had more money to spend, stayed in the big Canadian Pacific hotels on the edge of town, and no one minded them a bit.
Winter also brought the ski bums, the Australian and American kids who worked just enough to buy a lift pass and ski the season away. They packed out the staff accommodation shacks hidden well out of sight of the tourists in the backstreets, revealing their residence by the stinking T-shirts and ski-suits they hung out their windows to air.
Sometimes Sam had to take the staff minibus and pick them up; all part of the menial work as an employee of the Silver Ski Company. Other company guys minded plenty when it was their turn, but Sam kind of liked it. The Aussies were funny. In fact last season he’d gotten real friendly with a guy called Bunny Campbell from Melbourne, who’d invited Sam, Katie and the two kids out to Australia for a vacation. They’d never go. Sam knew that. But he got the occasional card from Bunny and it made him feel cosmopolitan, knowing someone half-way round the world.
Jess loved Bunny, her two-year-old hormones already tingling to the six-foot, golden-tanned antipodean hunk. Occasionally he would come and drag Sam out for a beer after work, sweep Jess into his arms and do a mock tango while Sam fetched his jacket. Sam had watched Katie watching Bunny and preferred not to examine the emotions he felt. Bunny was a good guy. A friend of the family.
The last card had come from Hawaii where Bunny was surfing. There was a picture of a model with big breasts holding a surf board under her arm, which Bunny had defaced by drawing a beard on the girl’s chin. The card had been addressed to Sam Two-Dogs-Fucking-Big-Chief-Skis-Like-A-Cow, and after initial irritation, Sam had laughed and stuck it on the door of the ice-box where all the other postcards lived. He hoped Bunny would be back this season. Sam never thought he’d have friends like that. Big, funny, happening.
White.
That was the truth. White friends. That’s what made him happy. And unhappy at the same time. Real unhappy, remembering what big tanned guys like Bunny used to mean to him when he was young – a time that didn’t get head space – not if Sam Hunt could help it.
Still, winter was good.
Like most Silver residents, the Hunts preferred winter to summer, but whatever the season, it was a bitch of an expensive town.
When the grimy railroad workers had built Silver over a hundred years ago, original name Siding Twenty-three, it was nothing more than a collection of tin and wooden huts in a clearing cut in the pines.
Now, any real estate agent’s window in town would make the ghosts of those guys swoon. Photos of houses were displayed like pornography, their doors open wide, their interiors on show to the casual viewer. And printed below, in discreet blue type, were prices that read like telephone numbers.
Little surprise then that the big houses by the river were mostly holiday homes, owned by rich city people; people who dressed expensively, and seemed built on a different scale, the way the women’s bones were so fine and the men’s shoulders so broad and square.
You could sometimes see them in summer behind their hedges, the way you might glimpse a shy wild animal in the trees, catching them talking and laughing in low voices round rustic garden tables. But in winter the only evidence that they were in residence was the thin blue lines of smoke from their chimneys and the shiny hire cars sitting in the drives.
Since only the seriously rich owned nice property in Silver, the workers who kept the town ticking lived in Stoke, ten miles away, in cheaper accommodation. But the Hunts were lucky. Really lucky. Katie’s family had vacationed in Silver all their life, and when her father bought a holiday house in 1955 it had cost about the same as a good canoe. It was their daughter Katie’s house now, its holiday function forfeited so that their grandchildren could have a house and a home. And it was a great house.
Sam thought for possibly the ten thousandth time what a great house it was as he and Billy pulled into the drive.
It sat high on Oriole Drive, south of main street, looking across the roofs of smaller houses to the mountains that hemmed in Stoke. You could just make out the railroad as it appeared between the pines on the edge of town, but the Trans-Canada highway was hidden, reminding the Hunts of its presence only when an easterly wind brought the distant sound of trucks to their door. Sam had painted the two-storey, detached house powder blue last fall, a choice that Katie had first disputed loudly in the lumber store, then applauded when she was enchanted by the result. Yes, it was a great house, and for the most part its wooden walls echoed to adult laughter, children’s squeals and the good-natured barking of Billy’s husky, Bart.
Bart was out there before the car stopped, bounding round the Toyota, as Light 96 died with the engine and Sam stretched into the back seat to pull out the groceries.
Inside, Katie Hunt chopped tomatoes and silently rehearsed a grouchy reception for her tardy partner, while Jess earnestly dragged crayon across paper at the end of the table.
Sam and Billy had been rehearsing too.
Sam began.
‘Okay. You want an explanation. It was a dinosaur in the supermarket. Billy spotted it first, in the canned vegetable aisle. Took us nearly an hour to fight it off with a roll of kitchen wipe.’
Billy nodded, smiling.
Katie stopped chopping. ‘Aw come on, guys. I needed that stuff light years ago. They’ll be here in an hour and a half.’
Sam put down the brown bags and from behind circled his arms round his small blonde wife, and kissed her ear.
‘Sorry babe.’
She was softening, but not quite soft.
‘Yeah, well sorry’s not going to fix dinner for six.’
‘For sure.’
‘Where were you?’
‘The railroad.’
‘Dice those onions.’
‘Okay.’
Bart, outside, watched through the kitchen window as the Hunt family reunited and got busy. He whined once and lay down in the snowless patch at his kennel door to watch the sun slide away behind the peaks.
4
‘… okay, so let’s just get this straight …’
There was a communal moan from the other five diners.
‘Come on! This is serious.’
Gerry was leaning forward on the table, using his fork which still speared a tube of pasta, to emphasize the importance of his words.
‘We agree that Bewitched was a subtle statement about the rising threat to men from feminism in sixties America. We agree that Samantha was subduing her massive and powerful superiority over Darren in order to keep him, the man as child, happy, and the home stable. But we can’t agree whether the programme was pro-woman or anti. Am I right?’
Gerry’s wife Ann mumbled through a mouthful of food.
‘Of course it was anti-woman.’
Katie jumped in again.
‘No way. It was the most important piece of feminist TV ever made. It said men are weak, women are strong. Men only just manage by the skin of their teeth to keep women in their place by emotional blackmail.’
Across the table Gerry’s sister Claire threw her husband Marty a look, as if pitying Katie, and moaned again. Gerry waved his fork again, clearly deciding he was chairman of this debate.
‘Right. Right. But by portraying Samantha as an individual only interested in shopping and hoovering, was that itself not undermining the women’s movement? Saying quite categorically, it doesn’t matter how strong women may be, at the end of the day they just want a credit card and cushions that unzip for cleaning?’
Katie shook her head. ‘Totally wrong. Women understood the subtext of that show.’
‘I took it as an anti-woman subtext. Quite clearly, as a matter of fact,’ said Claire, raising an eyebrow.
Sam stood, dropped his napkin on the table and cleared two empty wine bottles from the centre of the debris. ‘Anyone for more wine?’
Marty chucked himself in. ‘You see, there was a lot of angst going down then. Guys didn’t know the score.’
Sam, realizing that grabbing their attention would be as easy as getting Bill Clinton to come and mow his lawn, took the bottle and walked into the kitchen. He opened the ice-box and pulled out another cold Chablis while the voices from the dining room shouted each other down. To the sober man, the drunk is a curious beast. Sam always wondered why alcohol affected people’s volume control. An hour ago they were all talking normally, but now five of them were shouting like they were trying to be heard over a baseball crowd. Sam couldn’t imagine why, but then Sam had never had a drink in his life. Worried about the noise, he sneaked out of the kitchen and upstairs, the bottle still in his hand, to check on the kids.
The shaft of light from the open door to Jess’s bedroom illuminated one tiny hand on top of the comforter holding the arm of a fun-fur monkey.
Sam waited until his eyes adjusted to the contrast of light and dark, and was rewarded by a glimpse of the small dark head of his daughter lying peacefully on its pillow.
As he watched her chest rise and fall beneath the cover, he heard a whimpering from next door. He backed out of the room and stepped quickly to Billy’s door. Pushing it open, he saw Billy writhing on the bed, his comforter lying on the floor in a heap where it had been thrown off. Sam put the wine on the floor, picked up the bedcover and laid it gently over his dreaming son.
Billy was obviously in some distress. With the door fully open his face was clearly lit. It was light enough to see he was suffering some imagined agony. Sam toyed with waking him up, hugging him and telling him his Dad was here, but his decision was made for him as Billy sat up suddenly with a yell.
‘Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. Everything’s okay, Billy boy.’
Sam had him in his arms before the yell died on the boy’s lips. He held the small panting body close to his chest, rubbing his back with a large hand.
Billy’s tears came. ‘Dad. Make them stop. They have to stop.’
‘It’s just a dream Billy. Nothing’s happening.’
‘It is happening Dad. You have to warn them.’
Sam hugged him closer. ‘Okay. Okay. You tell me, and I’ll make them stop.’
Billy was sobbing, his whole body heaving under its Calgary Flames T-shirt. ‘They’re gonna let it go, Dad. You can’t let them.’
‘Who is, Billy? What are they going to let go?’
The boy started to cry again. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. The wolf told me. I just know it’s going to be bad. I saw them. Two of them.’
Sam rocked him back and forward, his hand now stroking Billy’s hair. He sat that way for a minute or more. ‘Sshhh now. I’ll stop them. It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep.’
But he was already asleep. In fact, Sam wondered if he’d been awake at all. Billy’s body was a dead weight in his arms, breathing steadily, arms hanging at his side.
Gently Sam let Billy back down onto the pillow and pulled the comforter up to his chin. He stood by the bed for a while, waiting to see if Billy would go back to the dark place he’d been in, but the crisis was over for now. From downstairs, a roar of indignation reminded him of his other duties, and he walked slowly out of the room, retrieving the wine as he went.
Looked like he hadn’t missed much. Ann was hard at it.
‘Well you can say that, but the kids I teach, and the kids Gerry teaches, haven’t a fucking clue what the whole movement was about.’
Katie was in a corner, holding the lions back with a chair. ‘Then it’s your duty to remind them. Unless you want all those little guys to grow up thinking they rule the world.’
Claire laughed sarcastically. ‘They do Katie. And they will.’
Sam picked up the corkscrew, opened the bottle and started filling glasses. ‘Yep, we do. Take it in turns as it happens. When it’s my turn I’m going to make it illegal to have waiters tell you their names before they bring the menu.’
Marty and Katie laughed. Claire was annoyed not to be taken seriously. ‘Yeah. Cute.’ She paused, taking stock. ‘Now I don’t know you Sam. In fact, this is the first time I’ve met you. But I’d say you’re an old-style kind of guy. Am I right, Katie?’
Claire picked up the wine glass that Sam had filled, and half-emptied it again.
Katie looked up at Sam with love. ‘No. You’re wrong. He’s cool.’
Claire was undeterred. ‘Gerry, Ann, help me out here. You’ve been friends with Sam and Katie how long?’
Gerry smiled and made a space between his palms that stretched, the way a fisherman lies about his catch.
‘So is this guy for or against women?’
Sam took his seat again, and looked cheerfully round the company with a smile of comic innocence. He beamed across at Katie. ‘Oh go on, honey. Tell them how I leave you the key to the chastity belt when I travel.’
Katie smiled again. ‘Yeah, but leaving it in the men’s washroom at the Bus Depot doesn’t count.’
Claire didn’t laugh. She folded her face into a mask of censure. ‘You know, in my job women have eighty-five per cent less chance of promotion than men. Eighty-five per cent. That’s no joke.’
Sam took a swig of soda. ‘Don’t that put you right off being a lumberjack then?’
Everyone laughed this time, and the fact that Marty sniggered into his wine let Claire out of the cage. She ran a finger round the top of her glass. ‘I would have thought that given your background, Sam, you’d be slightly more sympathetic to a statistic like that.’
Katie shot Sam a glance. Sam held Claire’s gaze.
‘Sorry. Not with you.’
‘No. I’m sorry. Sorry if I’m the one to remind you that Native Canadians don’t do too hot in the promotion stakes. That is if they can get a job at all.’
Sam looked steadily at her. ‘I got a job.’
Marty put a hand on Claire’s. ‘Claire.’
She pulled her hand away. ‘No, come on folks. Let’s face up to it here. What kind of a job have you got exactly, Sam? A good job?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh well pardon me once again. Gerry led me to believe you were a manual groomer. Not exactly executive status, unless Silver Ski Company’s started recruiting from Harvard.’
Sam said nothing.
Claire softened her voice, and if the intention by doing so was to paper over the cracks, it was wasted.
‘Look, all I’m saying is that I know how you people must feel. I’m a woman. I get shit on too.’
Sam looked into his soda like there was something dead in there. ‘I can believe that. The last part anyway.’
Marty wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Okay, time we were hitting the road. Listen, it was real nice meeting you. We’re staying with Gerry and Ann another week. Maybe we can all ski together.’
Katie was still looking at Sam. She slipped a hand beneath the table and wound her fingers between his. ‘Yeah. That’d be neat. I don’t know if we can take time off, but if we can, sure.’
Sam looked across at Claire. ‘If we can’t, I sure look forward to sweeping the snow off your car.’
Marty stood up, and the others followed his example, scraping their chairs on the wooden floor, and fussing over their possessions. Marty moved round the table, kissed Katie and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, Sam. Lighten up. Everyone’s a little gassed.’
Sam nodded solemnly.
There were polite noises made and Katie herded everyone out without the assistance of her husband who remained seated, staring into the middle of the abandoned table. He heard the door close and their footsteps crunching in the drive, and was aware of Katie standing behind him, leaning against the doorframe.
‘She was a jerk. Wasn’t it enough to just let her be one and leave it at that?’
‘Should have been.’
Katie pulled up a chair beside him and put her head on his shoulder. He slipped his arm round her.
‘I didn’t even get to serve the after-dinner mints.’
‘I should do it for a living, huh? Dinner parties cleared in minutes. Call Freephone 0800 Sam Hunt.’
‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
Sam sighed. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been kind of cranky all day.’
Katie undid the top three buttons of Sam’s silk shirt, ran her hand over the bone amulet he wore round his neck on a leather thong, and let her hand rest on his warm belly.
‘In fact cancel cranky. Replace with asshole.’
‘Can I help?’
He smiled down at the blue eyes in her pale oval face; the face of a Victorian china doll.
‘Sure. You can load the dishwasher.’
She guffawed and bit his shoulder. He lifted her head and kissed her small rosy mouth.
When Sam and Katie Hunt got to bed an hour later the dishwasher was still empty. The cushions on the sofa however, were going to need some recovery time.
Billy heard his parents climb the stairs and lay awake in the dark listening to their hushed voices as they turned off the hall lights.
His forehead was beaded with sweat and his hands were fists, clenching and unclenching across his chest. He knew he’d had a bad dream, nothing more, but the taste of it was still with him. Lying awake now, he wondered why he didn’t call out to his parents, bring them into his room to sit on his bed and talk to him in calm voices. But he didn’t want to see his parents right now. He wanted to see Bart. The wolf had told him to trust Bart, but Bart was in the yard, banished nightly from the house. Billy waited until he heard Sam and Katie’s door close gently. He gave it a minute and then reached out and turned on his bedside light.
He paused to see if the light from his room would bring an enquiry from next door, and when it didn’t he slipped out of bed and pulled on his plaid jacket.
Finding a torch in the toy box and opening his door carefully, Billy picked his way downstairs and through the house to the kitchen door by the light of the slim beam.
The sky was clear outside, a million stars glittering behind the black jagged silhouette of the mountains. Bart was standing outside his kennel, ears high, nostrils blowing clouds of vapour, face staring towards Wolf Mountain. There was only a tiny twitch of recognition and a small noise from the back of the animal’s throat when Billy knelt beside him and put his arms round Bart’s thick spiky coat.
Boy and dog looked out towards the mountain. Upstairs man, woman and child slept.
5
Lenny Sadowitz shifted a rogue piece of gum from between his cheek and back teeth before squinting up at the mountain, preparing to holler at his colleague.
‘C’mon, Jim. I got a life to lead!’
The word lead bounced off the rock, returning to his ears in a thin piping voice barely recognizable as his own. He watched his breath swirl in front of him, blew a few rings of frozen air, sucked the cold between his teeth and continued to chew. He leaned forward on the handlebars of the snow cat and watched his companion’s silhouette move silently between the other cat and the unexploded charge he was investigating.
Lenny hated being on avalanche rota. What was the point of being a ski patroller if you ended up miles away from the action on the trails, stuck in godforsaken gullies like this one with as much chance of getting some skiing in as Jim had of pulling that dreamboat waitress in T.J.’s Diner?
Having a white cross on your back impressed the public. It did nothing for the coyotes and the whiskeyjacks, and that was all there was for company in this part of the mountain.
This whole exercise was getting on Lenny’s tits. Why they should have to avalanche the cliffs on Wolf was anyone’s guess. If the loading slopes were a risk to the railroad, then the frigging railroad workers should come up here and blast them themselves. Lenny sure didn’t recall railroad maintenance as part of his job description when he signed up as a patroller.
He glared down the cliff at the thin track just visible between the tunnel mouths, and expelled a white globe of spit in its direction.
Lenny pushed his Ray-Bans up onto his forehead, narrowed his eyes and looked back up at his partner with disgust. The rule was that unexploded avalanche bombs get their location noted and then stay put until spring, when the patrollers simply wander over and pick them up out of the grass. Digging around in eight feet of powder for something the size of a shoe box is not a sensible course of action, especially when that shoe box could just blow your legs off. Not good enough for Jim. He knew where the bomb was and he was damned if he was going to let it lie there until the snows melted.
This was the second bitching day they’d been at this. Jim had thrown the charge yesterday, delighting in the formality of shouting fire in the hole! and then was puzzled and disappointed by its failure to detonate. He knew any danger of it exploding now was nil.
No, stubborn curiosity and a determination to put his house in order were the factors that made Jim decide to go and fetch that wayward bomb, before they carried on with their legitimate day’s work, to blast the bollocks out of the double black diamond run down Spangle Couloir. That’s where Lenny wanted to be, and that’s where Jim was stopping him being.
Jim’s fascination with explosives made Lenny despise him more. Jim was the incendiary expert in the resort but he was a pig on skis. Lenny and the two other guys who took turns to help out ‘lanching in the high season, got all the revenge they needed for being pulled off the trails to do this shit by scoring with any girl Jim looked at sideways. Girls don’t care much about dynamite when they get a chance of a guy with a tan and thighs like iron.
‘Aw Christ. What is he doing up there?’
Lenny got off the snow cat, sinking up to his knees in the soft snow, and cupped his gloved hands to a mouth ringed with white lip salve. ‘Jimbo! I’m losing toes down here. Get a fuckin’ move on!’
He saw the stooping figure of Jim look up, and then Lenny felt the explosion an age before he heard it.
Jim’s body dissolved rather than blew apart. His flesh pushed tennis-ball-sized holes in his Goretex smock, and the face that he had washed for twenty-six years and shaved for ten, remained nearly intact as the skull to which it had been attached splintered into a macabre approximation of a fibre-filled breakfast cereal. Lenny had just enough time to watch one of Jim’s arms windmilling through the air on its own like a stick you threw the dog.
Before the pieces that made up Jim McKenzie could attempt a landing, they were lost in the fountain of snow and rock that was heading towards Lenny. He didn’t run or shout, but then that would have been hard with only half a face left, the eye on the remainder of his face hanging uselessly down his cheek. The rock hit him on the left side of the head, knocking him sideways, and as his exposed brains quivered, ready to obey gravity, the snow melted into every orifice, as though it were disinfecting the wounds.
Six heli-skiers on their way to some dream powder in the back country saw the explosion from the air and thought nothing of it. The pilot, Abe Foster, thought a great deal about it. Avalanche explosions are small, and the avalanches they cause rumble, roll and then stop. This was a mother of a bang, with plumes of thick black smoke spiralling up from Wolf Mountain as though terrorists had hit an oil terminal. The whole hill seemed to be disintegrating.
Abe took the chopper up another five hundred feet and banked west to take a better look. It was bad. Christ help any poor sucker in the vicinity of a blow like that. Abe got on the radio and called patrol, then turned the chopper round, and, ignoring the whining from his dumb-assed stock-broker passengers, headed back to Silver.
Getting the kids out of the house was like playing with one of those mercury-filled hand-games where you tilt the piece of plastic until you manoeuvre the shiny sliver of liquid metal into a hole. Every time Sam shovelled a son into a coat and herded him into the back of the Toyota, a daughter had taken her coat off and was back amongst the wreckage of the breakfast table.
He was never very good at those hand-games, and he was no better at rounding his family up.
Sam Hunt was losing his temper. He stood in the driveway, his hands on his hips, as Jess waved happily to him from the kitchen window clutching a piece of toast in a starfish hand.
‘Honey. Jess isn’t ready. This happens every damn morning. Could we get Jess ready? Would that be too much to ask, that Jess’s ready? How hard can that be?’
Katie appeared at the door, wearing a wool, chequered coat and that smile she kept stored for occasions like this. The sight of her extinguished his ire.
‘It’s not hard, Sam. I’m the one who’s not ready. Just put her in the car and I’ll be right with you.’ She stepped out onto the drive and kissed him before flitting back inside on her mission to make him late.
Bart lay inside his kennel, his head on his paws, looking dolefully towards Billy inside the car.
Billy glowered back at him from between his Walkman earphones, rubbing a circle clear in the frosted window in the back of the car, whose engine was running unsteadily in an attempt to clear the windshields.
Sam, hands still on hips, shook his head and smiled, looking at his feet in mock defeat, when the explosion thundered in his eardrums. Katie stepped back outside, surprised. ‘That sure was a big ‘lanche blow.’
Billy poured himself out of the car, his mouth making an O shape.
‘Look, Sam. There’s smoke.’
A black plume rose from the cliffs on Wolf Mountain. ‘Lanchers didn’t make smoke. Just a bang and a rumble. There was a lot of smoke.
Jess was crying in the kitchen. Whether it was due to the explosion or because she had dropped her toast was unclear, but Katie went to attend to the matter.
Sam remained silent. He had felt that explosion somewhere very deep inside. Not just in the regular way that a loud noise seems to come from inside your head, but in a sick, unholy way, as if someone had whispered something filthy and inhuman to him.
His head was swimming and he felt nauseous. The smoke was still rising in a black column, its source hidden by the Hunts’ snowy roof. Sam could almost make out a form in the smoke. It was not a form he wished to look at for hours, the way he might look for shapes in the smoke of a log-fire, but it was the last thing he saw before he passed out.
Sam realized he was looking at the bedroom ceiling. Two familiar lozenge-shaped pieces of plaster that had been threatening to fall since the pipe burst last winter comfortingly filled his vision. He sometimes looked at those two shapes when Katie was on top of him, not irritated by the reminder of repairs to be done but soothed by the part they played in being bits of his house. The house they owned, well at least Katie owned. The house where he ate his dinner, watched TV, made love to his wife and brought up his kids. The house he had tried to make his own for ten years, lovingly patching its tiles, painting its flaky wood and scooping leaves from its gutters. Yes, his house. Their house.
‘Are you awake, honey? I think he’s awake, doctor. Sam, are you all right?’
Katie was bending over him now, obscuring the plaster shapes with her pale face. Sam smiled dreamily, remembering the photos they had taken in a booth in Calgary Airport, waiting for Katie’s parents to arrive from Vancouver. The booth’s exposure had been set for Katie’s fair white skin, and Sam’s dark Indian face had come out as a featureless brown blob. Katie had laughed hard at the four useless snaps of herself kissing what looked like an old brown football propped on the shoulders of a suede jacket. Sam had laughed too, but had stopped laughing when he saw the look on Katie’s parents’ faces as they realized that the Indian guy standing next to their daughter was not the cab driver waiting to relieve them of their luggage, but the man she had told them so much about. The man she had thrown it all away for. The man she had married.
‘Can you hear me, Mr Hunt?’
Alan Harris was leaning into Sam’s vision, bringing with him a faint smell of linoleum.
‘Sure. I hear you. I hit the deck, right?’
‘Right. How does the head feel?’ The doctor put his stethoscope to his ears and pulled back the goosedown comforter to put the cold metal to Sam’s chest.
‘Okay, I guess. How long have I been out?’
Katie’s face bobbed back into view. ‘A big scary fifty minutes, you wicked man. The doctor’s been in and out of here all day like he’s planning to move in.’ Her voice softened, and she put a hand to his brow. ‘We thought you were a hospital case. I can’t tell you what I’ve been going through or how glad I am to have you back.’
Sam closed his eyes again. Fifty minutes. What made him black out? His head was starting to hurt now, and the realization that he must have junked a whole day’s work was starting to make itself known in that area in the pit of his stomach reserved for anxiety. He opened his eyes abruptly. ‘Jesus, Katie. What about my shift? I was standing in for Ben. Did you call the office?’
‘Sure I called the office. They said they hoped you were okay and not to worry. And I called the museum, so I can take a few days off if you don’t feel like getting up right away. Stop chewing over it.’
Sam closed his eyes again, listening to the doctor making soft cooing noises to Katie about how everything seemed fine and when he was to take the painkillers and how she was to let him know if Sam’s head got sore and how were the kids and shit.
As he heard Katie closing the front door and the front wheels of Doctor Harris’s car having big trouble helping him leave the Hunts’ icy driveway, Sam drifted into gentle velvet sleep quite unlike the cold dark place he had been for the last fifty minutes.
Katie looked in from the bedroom door at her sleeping husband, his face no longer contorted as it had been since Andy next door helped her carry him inside, calm the children and call for help. For hours he had sweated and moaned as though someone were roasting him over a spit, but now he was just plain asleep.
His straight dark hair, damp with sweat, lay over the face she loved, and she exhaled lightly with relief that he was going to be all right.
But two things still bugged her. First, why he had passed out at all, and second, that for nearly fifty minutes of his blackout he’d been shouting and muttering in Siouan. Sam hadn’t spoken a word of Siouan since before they were married, except once when they’d had a minor car accident while Billy was a baby. He’d sworn briefly and violently in the ancient Indian tongue as Katie screamed, clutching Billy, and the car skidded off the highway, to rest harmlessly and mercifully on the verge.
He never used it again. The language of losers he called it. Whatever was bugging him in his dreams was powerful enough to turn back the clock for Sam and pull that long-abandoned language out of his past and into his mouth. It made Katie uneasy, although right now she couldn’t say why.
In half an hour she would go and collect Jess from Mrs Chaney, but now she could use a coffee and some time to herself. In the tiny kitchen, she switched the TV and the coffee machine on at the same plug. The local cable station was talking about the blast. Two ski patrollers killed, half the mountain gone above the Corkscrew tunnels, the railway blocked by rubble and ice. It was also a mystery. Some nervous reporter in a big anorak was standing in the car park beside Ledmore Creek stuttering that so far they could find no explanation for the size or violence of the blast but that theories included a pocket of methane gas detonated by chance.
Behind him blue lights flashed and people walked about pointing aimlessly. Katie poured herself a coffee, smiling at the ineptitude of local news, but deep down she was still worried why Sam had measured his length on the path not at the precise moment that pocket of methane had gone up, but moments later when they looked up at the smoke. The doc said it could have been the shock-waves if Sam was already feeling lightheaded from an encroaching infection. Katie didn’t think so. Shock waves don’t take that long, and Sam sure didn’t look like he was coming down with anything other than usual early morning grouchiness.
Katie had stomached enough of goddamn blasts and blackouts for one day. She switched off her worries, switched channels and sat down at the table to catch half an hour of a Green Acres re-run.
When Gerry turned up at the door, the snow was falling so thickly Katie could barely make him out. The snowman on the doorstep handed a conical shape to Katie and said, ‘Peace offering.’
She smiled, took the flowers already frosted with snow, and pulled Gerry in by the elbow.
Gerry shook himself like a dog in the kitchen. ‘Christ. This is going to make the ski company wet themselves.’
Katie already had the coffee machine back on. ‘Yeah. And not a whisper of it on the forecast. I want my money back from the weather channel. Grab a seat.’
Gerry installed himself at the kitchen table. ‘I heard from Billy at school. Is Sam okay?’
‘Yeah. He’s fine. We don’t know what all that fainting was about. Probably saw the hockey scores.’
She turned her back on Gerry and fished out a couple of mugs from the dishwasher.
‘Listen Katie … about the other night …’
‘Forget it, Gerry. It’s no big deal.’
‘It is a big deal. Claire’s my sister. Uptight corporate woman maybe, but my sister nevertheless, and I’m ashamed she upset Sam.’
Katie sighed and joined him at the table, toying with the defrosting flowers in their soggy paper wrapping. ‘You know the problem, Gerry. You’ve known us for nearly ten years. Sam just doesn’t think he’s an Indian.’
‘Kind of hard to forget. Especially when you look at Billy and Jess.’
Katie laughed.
‘I know. Sometimes I’m glad I can remember giving birth to them, or I’d think I had nothing to do with their creation at all. The Crosby DNA’s sure got mugged somewhere along the line by Sam’s.’
‘Is he mad at Ann and me for bringing Claire?’
Katie shook her head. ‘No. He’s mad at being born a Kinchuinick Indian and growing up on a reserve.’
‘Claire’s real embarrassed. She wondered if we could maybe have you all round to our place for supper before they head back to Montreal. But I guess if Sam’s not well …’
‘Let’s leave it, Gerry. But thanks for the thought.’
He nodded. The coffee machine gurgled its message that the brew was up.
‘So how’s school anyway?’
Gerry lightened up, his duty done. ‘It’s shit. As usual.’
‘The kids all talking about the explosion?’ She put two coffees in front of them.
‘And some. Of course now they’re also talking about this blizzard. They figure they’ll get time off if it keeps up.’
‘Billy seems distracted right now Gerry. Have you noticed?’
Gerry cupped the mug in his hand. ‘Can’t say I have. Was he upset by Sam collapsing?’
‘I don’t know. I just detect something disturbing him. Probably nothing. I thought you might notice, but I forgot teachers just practise riot control these days.’
‘Up yours.’
Katie laughed and drank her coffee. Gerry took one sip and stood up.
‘Look I really have to go. Just came to leave these.’
‘The coffee that good, huh?’
He kissed her on the ear and made for the kitchen door, then paused when he looked through the glass panel. ‘Hey, I think you should loosen up with the disciplinarian dog-owner bit and let Bart in. He’s carrying more snow than a blue trail.’
Katie came to the door. ‘I tried this morning, thanks Doctor Doolittle. He won’t come in.’
Gerry stepped into the blizzard again.
‘That’s huskies for you, huh? Bye!’
Katie waved goodbye, and looked over at Bart. Gerry was right. The dog was outside his kennel, almost completely covered in snow.
‘Here Bart. Come in boy.’ She patted her thigh.
Bart looked at Katie and then resumed his vigil, staring towards Wolf Mountain as if it were made of prime sirloin.
‘Jeez, a dysfunctional dog. That’s all we need. Next stop the Oprah Winfrey Show.’
Katie brushed the snow from her hair and shut the kitchen door.
6
Frank Sinatra was giving it all he had in the chorus of ‘It Happened in Monterey’, when Ernie Legat’s horny hand stretched out to the cab’s stereo and cut the cassette. Ol’ Blue Eyes was God to Ernie, but he liked to hear what the engine was up to when he hit Wolf Pass. In weather like this, with a full forty-ton load of frozen seafood behind him, he would be lucky to see second gear. That would be on the way up. On the descent into Silver, he could probably do with a parachute.
The snow was coming at him in the headlights like a corny asteroid storm on Star Trek, hypnotizing him with flakes that became rods of relentless white motion as they streaked past the windshield, and despite the work of the snowploughs, the road wasn’t giving away many clues as to where it stopped being road and started being ditch.
Ernie coaxed the eighteen-wheeler into a first cautious gear change as the gradient started to introduce itself.
‘Come on, you bastard.’
Ernie reached his paw out again to turn up the heater, figuring getting more heat in the cab would take some of it out of the engine. The truck was doing its best.
In the back, two hundred lobsters, bound for plates on the east coast, slid backwards an inch on their plastic pallets as the Peterbilt started its journey up the one-in-fourteen pass.
The snow was getting thicker with every foot Ernie climbed, making him curse that last coffee he’d had at Mabel’s. No wonder he hadn’t seen another truck for twenty miles. The sneaky sons of bitches waving hello to him back in Lanark must have known how bad stuff was up here and either left hours earlier or cut loose for the night in the parking holes down on the Trans-Canada. Not a sniff of trouble on the CB.
Well shit on them. Ernie liked to get where he was going, and even though this was shaping up to be one of the worst winters he could remember, it would take more than a blizzard to knock the stuffing out of his schedule.
He was getting near the summit now, and the old tub hadn’t put a wheel wrong. Nice and slowly, that was how to take it. Ernie could feel the road flattening out, and even though all he could see in the dark and through the snow was about fifteen feet of white featureless ribbon, he’d worked this godforsaken road often enough in daylight to guess he was right underneath the peak of Wolf Mountain. That meant at least two miles of even cruising before it was hang on to your hat for the slide down into Silver.
The chorus of ‘It Happened in Monterey’ started to form itself into a hum on Ernie’s lips. It died just as quick as he saw the figure up ahead. Standing at the side of the road was a man in a long black coat with his ungloved hand out, casual as you like, thumbing a lift. Ernie figured it must be at least minus thirty-five out there, but this guy was just standing in the snow like he was hitching a ride from some pals in a beach buggy on Sunset Boulevard.
Ernie started to brake. It was real fortunate for the guy in the coat that the truck was on the flat. Braking in snow like this was jack-knife city, but this was an emergency.
What the hell was a guy in a coat doing up here near midnight in a snowstorm, at least ten miles from anything remotely resembling civilization?
The truck managed a standstill about twenty yards past the man and Ernie watched in the wing mirror as the figure walked, not ran, but walked, slowly up to the passenger door, his face lit only by the red side-lights.
The company didn’t allow hitchers, but this was life or death and the way Ernie saw it, he had no choice. He hadn’t seen another vehicle either way for at least two hours. How long had the man been standing here, casually waiting for his lift?
Ernie braced himself for a hospital job, wondering how many fingers the guy would still be able to call his own after a minimum of two hours without gloves. He was already planning the detour to Silver’s RCMP station when the cab door opened.
A rush of cold air entered every part of Ernie Legat as the man held open the door and looked up at his driver.
‘Jesus Christ buddy, get in and shut the fuckin’ door will ya!’
A pale, thin face held two ice-blue eyes that looked straight into Ernie’s soul. The man’s age was hard to place. A line-free face crowned with white hair, and skin that was almost translucent, belied a look in his eyes that seemed a great deal older.
The only illumination, from the single weak cab-light, was not doing much to help this guy’s bid to get a bit part in a beach movie, but despite his pallor the hitcher’s smile was disarmingly warm and charming. Not the smile of a man who has just cheated death.
Ernie motioned to the man with a hand that was already losing feeling in the tips of its fingers, and as the stranger looked calmly around the cab like a man buying a secondhand car, the cold was becoming more than he could bear.
‘Silver?’
‘Sure,’ he replied impatiently. ‘Get in.’
Huge flakes of snow whirled into the cab, settling on the dumb kidney-shaped plaid cushion on the dashboard that Amy Legat had sewn for her husband, for use when his behind got numb after ten hours of non-stop.
The man climbed carefully into the passenger seat, closed the door, folded his hands on his lap and looked straight ahead.
The cab was colder than Hell and Ernie’s breath was coming out in fast, thick clouds. Fast, because for some reason he was a little breathless after the excitement of finding the guy way up here. Thick, because the temperature had dropped to something that would freeze the balls off a polar bear.
He groped for the heater. It was already on full. The cab would heat up again once they got going. Once they got going. God, why was he driving at two miles an hour? Get this thing moving.
The truck shifted a gear and picked up speed, but Ernie was driving without seeing. All he could think of was the guy in his peripheral vision, lit only by the instrument panel now, sitting silently three feet away.
No explanation seemed like it was going to be offered, but Ernie was damned if he wasn’t going to be repaid for the rule-breaking ride with at least an interesting tale. ‘So what the hell you doin’ out there, fella?’ Ernie settled back into his brown bead seat cover to enjoy whatever the hitcher had to offer.
‘Just working my way towards Silver. Thanks for the ride. Looked for a while like I was going to have to walk.’ The man beamed across at his saviour, and before Ernie could demand an expansion, the man continued in his soothing pleasant voice. ‘Do you know Silver well, Ernie?’
Ernie shot a surprised glance at him. ‘How do you know my name?’
The man leant over and tapped Ernie’s company ID, a plastic card hanging from a chain that also supported a tiny cowbell with Austria painted on it, that his daughter brought back for him from a school trip fifteen years ago. Ernie’s photo glared out from the ID like a man in pain, and the real Ernie glared over at his passenger, his face matching his picture. ‘It’s right here. Unless that’s not you.’ The man seemed pleased with himself. ‘Silver?’ He reminded Ernie, who remained locked in his frown.
‘Oh I know it well enough. Right now it’s choked with folks slidin’ around on the hills with wooden sticks stuck to their feet like damned fools, but in the summer it goes right back to bein’ the no-shit-happens, assholes in RVs, railroad town it always was. You got business there?’
The man smiled and looked out of his window, his face turned away from Ernie. ‘Yeah. I’ve got some business to take care of there.’ He turned back, beaming that smile again. ‘Thought I might pick up some work.’
Ernie saw a chance. ‘Well you sure would be plenty suited to skiing work, fella, being able to stand out there in minus God knows what without so much as a chilblain. How come you ain’t frostbitten, with no gloves or nothin’? And if you don’t mind me pryin’, how’d you get up there? Didn’t see no car.’
The man picked up Amy’s cushion, turning it over in his soft white hands, examining it as though it were made of porcelain. ‘Got dropped off from another ride a few hours ago. Didn’t expect it to be so cold, so I dug a snow-hole. Just off the road back there.’ He looked across at Ernie, studying the driver’s face closely. ‘An old Indian skill I picked up years ago. Outside, forty below. Inside warm as toast. Don’t even need a coat once you’ve sealed the entrance. Heard the truck coming and I just strolled on out to borrow the ride.’
Ernie mulled it over. ‘So the Indians dug snow-holes? Good to know the useless drunken bums could do somethin’.’
‘That’s a truth and no mistake,’ replied the man with a new tenor to his voice.
Ernie looked across at the man in his truck and his gaze was returned with an unfaltering stare that even in the dim light of the cab Ernie could read as a warning.
He changed the subject.
‘What kind of trucker would let you out there? It’s only ten more miles to Silver, and the road ain’t exactly goin’ no place else.’
The man’s face creased into a smile. ‘Did I say it was a trucker? It certainly was not, Ernie. Like you say, no knight of the road would make such an uncharitable drop. It was a goon in a four-by-four pick-up, and I guess he just got tired of my company. Driver’s prerogative. Still, mustn’t grumble. I’m going to get there anyhow.’ He grinned. Hugely. ‘Thanks to you, Ernie.’
Ernie grunted like an old dog in response.
The truck was already well into its descent, nosing down the other side of the pass, and Ernie turned his attention to making sure his baby wasn’t going to end up a forty-ton chrome and steel toboggan, heading for Silver the short way, straight down the cliff.
The heater was being a bitch. They’d been in the cab with the doors shut now for at least ten minutes, and Ernie could still see his breath. If this carried on he’d have to stop in Silver when he let his passenger out, get the thing fixed himself, or stop over until he could find someone who could.
He shifted down a gear, as he felt a slight give under the front wheels.
‘Are there many Indians in Silver?’
Ernie didn’t enjoy the last exchange about Indians. He wished he’d never brought the subject up. ‘Yeah. One or two.’
‘Assiniboine, Kinchuinick or Blackfoot?’
‘Kinchuinick mostly, I think. Hey, I don’t know, buddy. Do I look like Professor of Native North American Studies at Princeton?’
The road, which hadn’t seen a snowplough for hours, was having one last go at slowing up Ernie Legat and his seafood, boasting a drift of at least three feet across the last serious bend before the run out to town. Ernie could see the lights of Silver just starting to poke through the blizzard, and decided to ram the sucker. Without touching the brakes, he slammed the eighteen-wheeler into the snow bank and hoped it was only this high for a few feet.
Somewhere in one of the back axles, a set of wheels complained enough to shove the rig alarmingly to the left, but the truck held on and ten feet later they were clear. Silver twinkled ahead. Ernie knew his was the last thing on wheels that would get through that for a while. The ploughs wouldn’t even look at this until the storm calmed down and nothing he could see was hinting at that. He would drop his passenger and head for the truck stop at Maidston Creek, five miles down the valley. It looked like he’d have to sit out this tempest for a day or two.
‘Well, that weren’t too tidy, but we made it okay. Where d’you want off?’
‘Town boundary’ll do fine.’
They crawled up to the edge of town and the hydraulic brakes started hissing and puffing as soon as Ernie caught sight of the aluminium sign that read through a thin sheath of snow Welcome to Silver. Ski a bit of history!
‘Sure this is it?’ asked Ernie as the truck stopped by the sign.
‘Yeah. This is where I need to be. Thanks Ernie.’
He put the cushion he had held for the last few miles on the seat beside him, opened the door and hopped out, still holding the clutch-handle.
‘And don’t drive too long that you need Amy’s cushion now, hear?’ He shut the door and moved off into the darkness.
Ernie smiled at that. He picked up the cushion to put it back on the dash. He dropped it quickly back onto the seat. It was frozen into a solid, kidney-shaped block of ice.
A blast of hot air from the heater hit Ernie in the face. Seemed it was working again in a big way, and the sudden rush of heat gave him goosebumps, then something approaching a flush.
Suddenly Ernie Legat’s heart started to beat a little too fast. How did that guy know Amy made that cushion? How did he even know her name? He hadn’t said anything about it at all. Couldn’t explain that one from an I.D. in the cab.
And there was something else, something at the very back of Ernie’s mind that had bothered him all the way down the pass, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. What the hell was it?
He threw the truck into gear and started to move off, grateful, though he couldn’t say why, that the stranger had been swallowed up by the dark and the blizzard.
It was three miles out of Silver that Ernie had it. Even though the cab had been colder than a whore’s heart, it was only Ernie’s breath that clouded. He didn’t like to think about that. So he didn’t.
It was twenty minutes after two in the morning that Staff Sergeant Craig McGee stood at the edge of the Trans-Canada highway, looking at the single set of truck tracks already filled with snow, and realized that his sergeant, Joe Reader, was in big trouble.
Joe had been due back around ten, after a routine call to Stoke, on the other side of Wolf Pass. The guys at the store in Stoke who’d called him said he’d left around nine, and since there was a radio in the pick-up, he’d have called for help if he’d gotten stuck in the snow.
Craig didn’t like this. Joe was a radio junkie. He’d call up his boss just to say he’d seen an elk in the road, and if he was out there in a drift, Craig would have had an irritating call every two minutes plotting the exact minute-by-minute progress of his entrapment. Of course the radio could be down, which meant that Joe had a cold night ahead, but the truck tracks were evidence that something had got through the pass in the last two hours. If that were so, why hadn’t Joe clambered from some trucker’s cab hours ago and shambled into the office with a sheepish grin? A trucker wasn’t going to ignore a stranded pick-up, especially not one with the RCMP logo painted on the doors and blue and red lights on its roof.
The blizzard was approaching nightmare force, and Craig McGee could hardly stand against the might of the wind and the stinging bullets of snow. He ran back to the Cherokee, sitting off-road with its engine still running, and climbed back into the driving seat. There was no way a chopper could fly in this and it would be crap in the dark anyway, even with the spots on. Nothing for it but to wait for dawn and hope that Joe’s wife Estelle didn’t go hysterical on him in the meantime.
Craig turned the patrol vehicle round and headed back into town.
The Indians called the gash in the rock that ran from the top of Wolf Pass down to the Silver Creek, Makwiochpeekin, the Wolf’s Tooth. Fifty feet from the bottom of the gully what was left of Joe Reader’s pick-up lay wedged in the fissure of rock like a broken filling in that tooth. Joe’s head was almost severed from its torso but a stubborn sinew kept it hanging there, banging against the bare metal of the cab where it dangled upside-down. The snow eddied round the remains of Sergeant Reader in tiny cyclones as the ragged, gaping holes in the vehicle allowed it access to the carnage.
Two crows perched on a tiny ledge on the cliff watched the meat hanging from its metal larder, swinging gently with the wind. Perhaps when they were sure it was safe, they would fly over there and explore.
But for now only the snow and the wind explored Joe and his vehicle, and from the look in his eyes, which were two frozen balls in his battered head, Joe Reader didn’t mind a bit.
7
When Katie Hunt’s phone rang, she jumped. She hoped it was Sam, and it was. Only two days back at work after his blackout and the ski company had sent him to Stoke for fencing in one of the worst blizzards she could remember. That seemed to Katie to be a slice of a raw deal, but the Hunt family had long since learned to lock away resentment at raw deals in a mental box marked Leave It.
Right now, she was just glad he was safe.
‘So where you going to spend the night, honey?’
Sam sounded tired. ‘Well it’s either the Stoke Hilton or I can bed down in the ticket office. I’m gonna go for the ticket office. Room service is quicker. Seems like I’m the only homeless one round here, so I get the place to myself. It sure beats the hell out of sleeping in the ski truck in a twelve-foot drift. You okay?’
‘Sure. You okay? No headaches?’
Katie heard Sam smile through his voice. ‘No. No headaches. No drooling down my chin like a lunatic. No writhing on the floor in a fit.’
Katie ignored his mockery of her concern. ‘When do you think you’ll make it home?’
‘If the blizzard lets up I guess the pass’ll be open by about noon tomorrow. You can wear my wool shirt if you get cold in bed without me.’
‘Sam?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, babe.’
Billy yelled from the other room, and Katie said her goodbyes and hung up. Some chat show host was smarming through his front of show stand-up, while Billy Hunt ignored him in favour of a hand-held computer game. He yelled again as Katie came into the L-shaped room that was the biggest living space in the house.
‘Nine thousand, Mom! I got nine thousand! Yeees!’
Katie stood behind her son, and ran one thoughtful hand through his straight black hair. ‘Bed, Billy boy. Now.’
‘You said I could wait up and see Dad,’ he replied without taking his eyes off the grey plastic block in his hand.
‘Dad’s stranded in the storm over at Stoke. He’s coming home tomorrow, so that means bed for you, right now.’
She leaned over and switched off Billy’s game.
‘Aw Mom!’
‘I said now, Billy. Your hockey kit’s at the foot of your bed. You forget to put it in your bag again tomorrow, then you’re on your own, kid. I’m not driving round to school with it.’ She turned to leave the room.
‘Mom?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Dad won’t be at home tonight at all?’
Suddenly he looked worried. Katie went back and joined him on the sofa.
‘It’s okay. Like I said: he’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘Can Bart sleep with me tonight?’
Katie tried to look hurt. ‘Oh, so Jess and I won’t do for company then? I keep forgetting, we’re just sappy girls.’
Billy put his hand in hers, and looked into her eyes with such concern she already regretted the joke. ‘You do fine. I just want Bart with me. It’s important.’
Katie squeezed his little hand. ‘Sure. If you can get him in. Good luck. You know what he’s been like.’
‘Great!’
‘Now go get ready for bed. I’ll be up in a minute.’
Her son bounced up and hopped on one foot to the door, singing as he went. His nine-year-old mind had already moved on to other matters. Likewise, Katie’s thirty-four-year-old mind had drifted back to her husband, worry and anxiety drilling into her. It was wrenched back to reality by the sound of Bart bounding up stairs with Billy, as the dog knocked over the frosted glass vase on the landing.
She smiled, and went to play at being stern.
When dawn came on January tenth it revealed the best snow conditions Silver Ski Company had seen for fifteen seasons. It also brought Estelle Reader the worst day of her life.
When they brought back what was left of Joe around one-thirty, Craig had been first at Estelle’s door, his face a grey mask of grief. Craig thought about the kind of suffering you see in the movies, where widows thank the policeman, squeeze his hand, and sit quietly in a chair absorbing the news. He thought about it as Estelle fell to her knees gurgling like a pig being bled, clutching at Craig’s jacket with fists like claws. She writhed on the floor and tore at the rug, saliva running from her mouth as she grunted and panted in the pain of her despair, until Craig hooked his hands under her armpits and lifted her onto a chair.
Life wasn’t like the movies. In fact life in Silver over the last week had been real bad.
Two ski patrollers killed in a freak explosion, and now Joe. He would, of course, have to tell Estelle that Joe’s death hadn’t been an accident, but not now. Time for that later, and time was going to bring her more pain. She would have to suffer the wait before they could lay Joe in the ground, while an autopsy was performed on the grisly remains.
From what they recovered in the gorge, there wasn’t much left to fit in a coffin, and after the forensics had been at him, Craig suspected a Safeway’s bag would probably be big enough to bury his ex-sergeant decently.
He waited with the moaning shell of Estelle Reader until her sister got there, then left and headed back to work.
Half a mile from the office, Craig McGee pulled off the highway into a back road, stopped the engine and cried like a baby. He would be all right in half an hour. Right now, he was broken up.
‘No kidding? Well if it’s a problem we can send a car to the airport to bring her luggage separately.’
Pasqual Weaver watched her own reflection in the office window as she spoke. An elegant, if angular, woman in her thirties looked back, the grey fleece zippered top with the Silver Ski Company logo embroidered on the left breast doing its best to undermine her executive status.
The hand unoccupied by the telephone played with the zipper at her neck.
‘Sure, we want her to be real comfortable. And can I say we’re already over the moon she’s even considering it.’
Eric entered the room and Pasqual mimed at him to sit down.
‘Okay James, you put those things to her and get back to us when you have an answer, but please tell her from us that we’re all huge fans and are really hoping she can make it. Okay, you too. Take care.’ She hung up, and gave the phone her middle finger. ‘Jesus. The fucking old bitch is acting like she’s still a star. Make my day, Eric. Tell me you’ve come to persuade me this celebrity ski week idea is a crock of shit.’
Eric Sindon had not come to say any such thing. ‘You’ve heard about the accident?’
Pasqual’s body changed shape. No longer lounging in her leather chair, it was now sitting forward like a cat watching its prey before striking.
‘Tell me.’
‘Craig’s side-kick. His truck went over the gorge on Wolf’s Pass last night.’
Pasqual sat back in her chair with relief. ‘Fuck. Don’t give me scares like that. I thought we’d had a fatality on the slopes. I think we can live with a cop in an auto accident.’
Eric looked at his boss with distaste. ‘It’s the third death in Silver in a week. I’m getting rumours that there’s more to it than just an automobile accident.’
Pasqual opened her top drawer and fished around until she found a packet of M&Ms.
‘Want one?’ She tossed the packet over the desk to Eric after filling her mouth with chocolate.
‘No. Look, I’m telling you this because I think it will have a negative effect on the resort. Skiers don’t get off on reading about death when they should be reading about snow reports.’
‘Eric, I think our visitors are big enough boys and girls to cope with the fact that sometimes people die in cars.’
‘What about Lenny and Jim?’
‘Accidents happen. They were patrollers for Christ’s sake.’
Eric looked at her and she knew that look. Pasqual stood up and turned her back to him, looking out of the window at the last of the die-hard skiers stepping out of their bindings beside the lodge after stealing the last run of the day.
‘What do you see out there, Eric?’
‘A lodge that needs a re-clad and a nursery area that needs two extra tows.’
She laughed, and threw another chocolate peanut into her mouth. ‘Well, maybe so, but I see the best fucking snow we’ve had in years, and a season that’s going to do business like a cold beer stall in Hell.’ She turned back to him. ‘Now what exactly are you worried about?’
‘Someone has to.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning you shouldn’t underestimate negative vibes in a fun resort, Pasqual.’
She sat down and smiled a wicked cat grin at him. ‘Are you telling me my job, Mr Sindon?’
Eric sighed. ‘Okay, forget it. Just thought it was worth mentioning.’
‘Thank you.’
Eric shoved some paper at her.
‘Here’s the shop stock-taking list, and there’s a guy outside looking for work. Do you want me to see him?’
‘Nope. I’ll see him. You fax more celebrities. Try and get something more famous than someone who voiced over an AT&T commercial. Remember the blackmail bit about the kids in wheelchairs. Lay it on as thick as you like. Where’s the guy?’
‘In the ski school.’
She emptied the last of the chocolates into her mouth, threw the packet in the waste bin and moved to the door. ‘Oh and Eric …’
Eric looked up expectantly.
‘No more drama-queen stuff unless a gondola full of customers spontaneously combusts. Right?’
Eric held her gaze without reply for a few more moments than was polite.
‘You’re the boss.’
‘Yes. I am. Aren’t I?’
She smiled and shut the door behind her. Eric looked at the door for a long time until the phone rang.
* * *
As Pasqual left the seclusion of her inner office, walking through the shop and past the ticket booths, she ran the gauntlet of questions and greetings from every member of staff in her path.
‘Oh Miss Weaver! Got a moment?’
‘Pasqual! Can you call the top station?’
‘Miss Weaver – any thoughts on this display?’
She loved it. She adored being pursued by a team of courtiers, anxious for her approval or instruction, and she treasured it all the more when the public saw her in the middle of it.
As she left the building and crossed the darkening nursery area to the ski school shed, she tossed her short brown bobbed hair, waved and shouted ‘Hi!’ to anyone who would respond.
The man was waiting inside. He greeted her with a smile.
‘Hi there. You’re the job hunter.’
‘Yeah. You must be Pasqual Weaver. Moses Sitconski. Pleased to meet you.’
He extended a lily-white hand, which she shook.
‘What kind of a name is that exactly?’
The man looked at her, neither offended or defensive. ‘My name.’
‘Well, Moses,’ she said, pronouncing the word as though it were a shared and intimate joke, ‘You’ve done your resort personnel homework. Now what kind of work are you after? We’re nearly half-way through the season, you know.’
‘Sure, I know. Looks like it’s going to be a great second half. Long time since I’ve seen snow conditions this good. I guess the powder in the back bowls is like spun sugar right now.’
He smiled, crinkling two ice-blue eyes in a face so pale Pasqual figured the guy had never been near a ski trail in his life. She was used to dealing with people with mahogany tans that stopped where their turtlenecks started, but the easy charm of this man was making up for the fact that he was obviously no ski bum. Nor was he dressed like anyone who wanted to be near snow. A long black wool coat hung over what Pasqual noted was a powerful frame. She wasn’t looking at a potential ski instructor, but maybe he’d be some use in the PR office.
‘You a skier, Moses?’
‘Sure. I can get down most things.’
‘So where have you worked before? And what as exactly?’
The man looked into her eyes very deeply indeed.
Pasqual was aware of an acute sexual stirring beginning around her nipples that shifted down over her belly to an area she didn’t have much time to explore these days. He was turning her on with those eyes, and she was ashamed. Why this encounter should have such an effect was a mystery, and made her squirm beneath her fleece with discomfort and irritation. After all, she was surrounded all day by pieces of meat on skis that she could have just by looking sideways at them. If she chose to, she could fuck any instructor on the resort, but sex was never high on Pasqual Weaver’s agenda. Right now, however, it was standing at the front door ringing the bell.
Бесплатный фрагмент закончился.
