The Trickster. Muriel Gray
gave way in ungracious rivulets and when he pulled on the metal the door creaked open reluctantly.
It had been a man. Now it was ice. The eyes were swollen horribly, the result of their moisture freezing and expanding, and they stared, boggling, out of the windscreen into nothing. The tongue protruded like a gargoyle, long and pointed and white, and the hands still gripped the wheel as though this man of ice was shouting maniacally at a driver who’d just cut him up bad.
Dan stared at it for a long time, his own mouth open, almost aping the frozen figure he beheld. Sonny, unable to open the driver door, joined Dan at his elbow.
‘God almighty.’
Dan stepped down, still staring at the nightmare, and let Sonny in. He climbed up and touched the figure gingerly with a gloved finger. It was hard as rock.
Sonny looked round the cab. Full of snow. Snow on the floor, snow banked up on the seat against the door, snow in a cornice along the windshield. What the hell had this guy been doing?
Why would you let the cab fill with snow, shut the doors, and then sit at the wheel until you froze to death? He cleared the dash with the back of his hand and found the driver’s ID.
Ernie Legat. Fifty-five years old.
He sighed and backed out of the cab. Poor Ernie. The guy must have planned it like this. Probably had gambling debts or something. Sonny had seen plenty creative suicides, but they never got any easier to deal with. Poor Ernie.
Keeping the yard from clogging with snow was impossible. That was probably why Wilber Stonerider had been given the task. Flakes the size of golf balls were driving through the chicken wire in the compound as though his shovel were their sole target. No big deal. He would have a drink soon. He felt the half-bottle of whisky in his jacket pocket bumping against his thigh with every thrust of the shovel and let himself imagine the moment when he could slip behind one of the dismantled buses in the compound and take a long, delicious mouthful. Inside the shed, the engineers were clattering around their machines, shouting to each other and playing the radio loud, their noise echoing round the huge tin building as though they were in a drum.
The buses that ended up here were like sick animals. They stood passively inside the shed and out in the yard, waiting to be attended by the gang of mechanical surgeons who would strip back their bodywork and probe their insides. Wilber, meanwhile, got to sweep the yard. But then Wilber was not exactly a regular employee of Fox Line Travel. Wilber was putting in some community service hours, penance for being drunk and disorderly in the Empire Hotel when he managed to smash three chairs and assault a waitress called Candy.
He’d figured this would be preferable to a couple of days in the slammer but now, with the snow making his task Herculean, he wasn’t so sure. The RCs didn’t dare touch you these days. No way. The band had hired that fancy lady lawyer from Edmonton who’d throw the book at them if any Kinchuinick Indian came out of their custody with so much as a scratch. Sure, they would call you every name in the book and some that didn’t make it into the book, but they couldn’t break your face. She was the best thing the band ever bought. Even looked after off-reserve Indians like Wilber. All you had to do was use your one phone call to her and, bingo, she’d get you off the hook. Of course from Silver, calling the band office was long distance, but that didn’t matter none. So far Wilber had called the lady lawyer four times. He was really getting value for money. Okay, value for the band’s money. Except this time, he wished he’d taken the days in pokey. You got food and sleep, and it was warm. Of course there was no liquor or tobacco, and that was hard to go without for three days. He felt the bottle again on his leg and decided that he’d made the right choice. He ran his tongue over dry lips, catching a flake as it tried to fly into his mouth. Now was as good a time as any to step quietly behind the bus and have a small refreshment. He shovelled noisily towards the bus and slipped behind its great frozen flanks, out of sight of the open shed door. With his back to the chicken wire, he propped the shovel against the bus and fished in his light blue parka for the bottle. Even the warmth of his body hadn’t made any impression on the whisky, and it was as cold as a beer straight from the ice-box when he put it to his lips and threw his head back.
‘Tasty?’
Wilber choked on the liquid burning down his throat and coughed like a consumptive. His eyes were streaming as he pirouetted round to see who had addressed him from the other side of the wire.
A man, a man just like him, stood smiling from the sidewalk outside the compound, his eyes piercing Wilber like skewers.
‘What the fuck …’
The man put one hand up to the wire, coiled his fingers through the diamond-shaped hole and with the other hand put a finger to his lips to make a hushing mime, as if to a baby crying in its cot.
Wilber was confused and not a little pissed off. He wrestled his coughing under control, and blinked at the guy like he was crazy. Still hanging on the fence the man put his hand back into his pocket and spoke deliberately, in the manner of someone making an announcement.
‘I am …’ he paused as if for dramatic effect, and smiled, ‘… Sitconski.’
Wilber blinked at him at again. He screwed the top back on his whisky and stepped back slightly from the wire. ‘Yeah?’
The man stood perfectly still, waiting.
Wilber flicked through a mental filing cabinet of what this guy wanted. He took a guess. ‘You from Welfare?’
There was an almost imperceptible change in the man’s demeanour, but Wilber Stonerider picked it up. Was it anger? Why would a total stranger be angry at him? He’d done nothing. Well, nothing he wasn’t already paying for. But there it was in this guy’s eyes. Anger. Definitely.
This time the man spoke softly, and if Wilber were honest with himself, menacingly.
‘My name is Sitconski.’ He scanned the forty-two-year-old Indian’s face as if searching for a concealed message, a smile forming on his lips again. This time, an unmistakably cruel smile. ‘Moses Sitconski.’ The smile gave way to a dry laugh, like ice cracking under a boot.
Wilber was out of his depth here. The guy was obviously a nut. And he was a nut interfering with the only serious drinking time he might grab this morning. Any moment now the foreman would walk out of the shed looking for him and it would be too late to take another swig. If he wasn’t here to pin something on him, this guy could get lost.
‘Nice meeting you, Mr Sitconski.’ He turned his back on the guy and picked up his shovel. There was, after all, eight feet of wire netting between them. The voice that came back at him this time made Wilber freeze like an animal in headlights.
‘Do you know my name?’
What was wrong with that voice? It was a human voice. Was it though? There was something horrible running beneath the syllables, like a sewer running under a sidewalk. Frightened, Wilber turned round slowly to face the man again. The snow was falling thick and silent between them and Wilber’s breath sent white clouds billowing between the flakes. If the man was breathing at all it was like an athlete. There was no vapour from his mouth or nose at all. Wilber realized the hand holding the shovel was shaking and that he still held his bottle in the other. He leaned the shovel on the fence, unscrewed the bottle and took a long draught. Of course he could always run away, but something told him no one would ever run fast enough from this man.
The whisky hit the spot and gave him back his voice. He laughed nervously. ‘Sure. Sure I know your name, mister. You just told me it. Moses Sitconski.’
Wilber thought he saw ripples in the man. That was the only way he could describe it. Like the guy had something under his clothing. No, under his skin. And it was stirring, getting restless.
‘Do you know my name?’
He wanted to cry now. What was this? Something was happening to the