The Trickster

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 rumble 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