Muriel Gray - The Trickster

‘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.