The Trickster. Muriel Gray
glad she was safe. But there was talking to be done as her father put it, and never mind them, he thought Tom deserved an explanation.
So she wrote it all down in a letter and posted it to him. Nothing about Sam, just about her and Tom and why it could never work, then packed a bag and made a rail reservation. She didn’t tell her parents who she’d fallen for. She wanted to see if it was enough for them that she needed to be free, that she yearned for something else other than a middle-class life in a Vancouver suburb. And it seemed to be. They asked no questions. They gave her the keys to the house in Silver and kissed her goodbye. When Katie Crosby stepped on that eastbound Via Rail train she had never felt so free in her life.
The miracle was there. Sam was at the station.
Katie saw him from the window before the train stopped, a tall, solitary figure leaning against a wooden parcel trolley. She was completely unable to decipher the emotion that the sight of that patient, hopeful man standing alone on a train platform stirred in her. It was more than love and gratitude. It was more than the very real need to weep. It seemed as though he had always been there, waiting for her to realize who she was and come and find him. But even that could not fully explain the complexity of her passion.
She stepped down from the carriage and waited motionless for him to see her, her bags at her feet.
Katie watched as Sam scanned the crowd of passengers weaving their way from the train to the street. He saw her. The invisible beam of light between them set fire to his face, but he walked rather than ran to her. They said nothing for nearly a full minute as he held her, then he held her face in his hands. ‘I thought I’d check the trains every day for a month.’
That was his explanation. Simple.
‘And then what? What about the fifth week?’
He looked down into her eyes, milky blue jewels, swimming with tears. ‘And then I’d check them for another month.’
They married nine days later, and Mr and Mrs Hunt started married life in the tiny staff accommodation room that Sam rented from the bus company. He wouldn’t use the Crosbys’ house and Katie respected his wishes. It wasn’t hard for Katie to get a job in Silver. Everyone knew Frank and June Crosby’s girl, and within a month of having run out on Tom, Katie was a happily married woman, selling fossils and loose gemstones to Japanese tourists in a lobby arcade shop in The Rocky Mountain Chateau, the massive Canadian Pacific hotel on the edge of town.
Of course there was tension on the day they picked Frank and June up from Calgary Airport, but it was a lot for the Crosbys to take in at once. She forgave them, like she hoped they would forgive her.
And two beautiful grandchildren had subsequently softened everything. Now, her parents liked to think of themselves as shining white liberals, proud their daughter had rejected the shiny prize of North American conspicuous consumption for love.
Oh it was love all right. A deep, enduring, growing and generous love. He had never once let her down in any aspect of their life, and she hoped he could say the same of her. She loved Sam and her children more than anything in the world, and the snarling female wolf downstairs would have tough competition from Katie when it came to who was more terrifying in defending their family.
Which was why her antennae were twitching now. Sam wasn’t himself. It wasn’t just the blackouts, it was as though he was fighting some secret battle.
Katie ran a hand over the top of the model mountain’s glass case and then walked to the wall to unplug the cable.
The snow was piling up outside and she looked forward to kicking her way home through it, letting the big flakes settle on her hair and the cold making her cheeks blush with cold. Katie Hunt loved the snow. But Katie Hunt did not love secrets, which was why she was going to keep a watchful eye on her family. The stuffed wolf continued to bare its teeth silently downstairs, in a lifeless tableau of female solidarity.
Eric Sindon’s formidable rota hadn’t taken Sam’s involuntary stop-over at Stoke into account. There were no points for getting stranded in the snow, and certainly no favours for manual groomers, a species regarded by Silver Ski Company as only slightly further up the food chain than lichen.
Sam found his welcome back to a full day at the depot consisted of being assigned to the bottom station of the Beaver chairlift, on the day of the fun-run. The Beaver run, an easy green trail, was in shade all morning until the sun crept up and hit it around two-thirty. The geeks in fancy dress would come down then, racing for some dumb prize, dressed like morons. Another idea of Pasqual Weaver’s. But that wouldn’t happen until the sun came round. That meant Sam had to freeze his balls off in the shadow of the mountain for six hours while he loaded untidy, grouchy herds of beginners onto the creaky old chairlift. Meanwhile, the lucky guys who drew a longer straw with Sindon basked in the sun on the south-facing slopes, saluting happy passengers on the high-speed quads, and topping up their tans.
As Sam shovelled more snow onto the chair run-up platform, Eric Sindon’s rota of injustice was far from his mind.
Dreams were one thing. Blackouts that left you unable to account for your actions were another. Sam had wrestled with his damaged memory since waking at Stoke, trying in vain to recall how he came to be in the truck. The part of it all that stung him hard was the blood. There was no escape from the fact. His face, his chin to be exact, had been covered in thick, dried, blackened blood. Sam had woken in the warm truck to find himself half-way up the pass from Stoke, on the edge of the highway with the engine running. He had sat in the cab for at least five minutes trying to figure out what the hell had gotten him there, until a glance in the rear-view mirror let him catch sight of his face. Everything below his nose was black with it. It caked his face like a kid’s first chocolate brownie at a party.
His first thought was that he was dying. The panic that rose in his breast sent images of Katie and the kids whirling in front of his eyes, and although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, he had croaked Katie’s name as his hands flew to his face.
But the blood was old, and Sam was not wounded. Half-falling from the cab into the road, he scrubbed at his face with handfuls of snow until the blood, and what felt like most of his head, had finally disappeared.
Now, faced with the grinding normality of the first of the morning’s skiers clattering onto the chair, the incident felt like a distant and vile nightmare. Except that Sam knew it had been real.
The cold was real, too. And the conditions were hellish. All this snow might be good for business, but only if it would damn well stop. It was clear right now, but the blizzards had been rolling in and out of Silver like they’d been ordered. Huge dumps aren’t much use if the pass keeps closing. This morning, it was minus twenty at the lodge and Sam shovelled like a fevered gold prospector to keep his circulation going.
The Beaver took three-at-a-time on a chair that should have been junked ten years ago. Skiers were arriving at his hut in ones and twos, warming up with the first run of the day down what the instructors called a pussy run. This was where Sam was supposed to say have a nice day and enjoy your run as he steadied the chair for them and swept the snow off the seat with a broom. Today, it was unlikely Sam would win bonus money for being employee of the month. In fact, the skiers would be lucky if he looked at them. Sam Hunt was in a very far-away place.
Two early morning ski patrollers, Baz and Grant, who’d been laying the slalom poles for the fun-run, skidded up to the chair, coming to a halt with whoops in a high spray of snow directly and deliberately aimed at Sam, with the misguided intention of making him laugh. Mistake.
‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Sam barked at them from beneath his new mantle of snow, like a snowman possessed by a demon.
‘Hey. So the customer relations course went well then, Sam, huh?’ Baz laughed with an abandon that came with the knowledge he’d soon be skiing in the sun with girls looking at his butt.
‘Sure. Soon as I see any customers I’ll give ’em a hug and ask them back home for dinner. Meanwhile all I see are assholes with backpacks.’
Grant smiled. ‘Whoooeee, Baz! Let’s