Muriel Gray - The Trickster

Then a young man appeared in the blue company overalls, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. A young, impossibly handsome man. Sam was twenty-five, six feet tall, his black shiny hair swept back from a noble forehead. His blue tunic top was open by three buttons, revealing a T-shirt beneath and the suggestion of tight brown pectorals. He was obviously Indian and to Katie’s surprise, he was also undeniably gorgeous.

This driver from the planet sex stopped and looked at Katie, and then at the nearly full bus through the glass doors. Walking over to her he handed her the coffee. ‘Can you hold this, miss? I’ll be right back.’

She took the cup, astonished.

He boarded his busy vehicle and she could see through the doors people standing and milling about on board. In seconds the passengers were pouring off the bus, back through the doors into the depot concourse.

Sam was at their back, waving his hands and shouting, ‘Come on, that’s it … hurry along … quick as you can …’

The passengers milled around grouchily, complaining under their breath, in front of Katie. She was going to be last again.

Sam pushed his way through to where Katie stood, took her by the hand not occupied holding his coffee, and led her to the front of the line.

He cleared his throat, and clapped his hands together twice. ‘Could I have your attention please, ladies and gentlemen?’

They grew silent, some fishing around in bags for the tickets they were now going to have to present.

‘I’d like to introduce you all to a very special person.’

Katie looked at him, horrified. What was this? The crowd started to look curious.

‘This young lady is unique in Canada and it’s a great honour to have her with us today. We, at Fox Line Travel, always knew that one day she would grace us with her presence, but now it’s happened, and all I can say is that I’m humbled to find that I’m one of the people to witness it.’

The crowd started to buzz with low conversation, heads bobbing up to get a look at the woman this bus driver held by the hand.

Katie was blushing to her feet. What on earth was this man doing? Who did he think she was?

Sam held up a finger. ‘Now I know there’s not much time for speeches or nothing, what with the bus already a few minutes behind schedule, but let me, on behalf of the bus line, just say this.’ The crowd were expectant. Sam turned to Katie, smiling, and under his breath said, ‘What’s your name?’

Stunned by the warmth of his smile, she replied. ‘Katie Crosby.’

Sam looked to his audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Katie Crosby, the only, and I mean only, woman in Canada …’ he paused. ‘Who can FUCKING READ!’

There was a stunned and shocked silence and then Katie burst out laughing. The crowd exploded into an irritated hubbub of noise, peppered with well really and cheeky son of a bitch .

Sam smiled and stood defiantly by the sign, tapping it with a finger. He let go of Katie’s hand and waved her through. ‘Keep the coffee. It’s milk, no sugar.’

She smiled and got on the empty bus, into her favourite seat. Opposite the driver.

Through the window she could see Sam smiling at his frowning passengers, and lip-read him saying tickets please as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

That was a great journey. They talked, of course. All the way to Lazy Hot Springs, until Katie had to get off. She’d gone off the idea of a hike by then. All she wanted to do was stay on that bus and talk more to the handsome funny guy at the wheel. But she got up and made to leave and when he asked her for her phone number she told him. He smiled, opened the hydraulic doors and said, ‘Fox Line wishes you a nice day. Driver Sam wishes you a shitty one for not taking him with you.’

She laughed and waved goodbye, still waving as the bus pulled away, with windows full of glowering people staring at her like she was the Anti-Christ.

All she thought about on the hike was Sam. Her head was spinning and she walked further than she intended, striding out in a trance. Why would she give a bus driver her number in Silver when she practically lived with Tom? But she didn’t regret it, and when the bus back that evening was driven by a middle-aged pot-bellied man with a moustache, she was crestfallen.

The phone call came the next day, her father getting there first. He asked who was speaking in a very careful and deliberate way and then called Katie to the phone in the parlour. He held the receiver out to her as if showing a child something it had damaged and waiting for an apology.

‘A Sam Hunt. For you.’

Katie’s heart had started pounding. She was as excited as a sixteen-year-old on her first date and her father could see it through her mask of indifference.

She took the receiver without putting it to her ear and said thank you . Frank Crosby understood the gesture and left the room.

With that first Hello? she knew it was over with Tom. She and Sam met that afternoon in town and walked up through the trail in the forest to the old fire lookout hut. And they had sex that nearly made Katie die with ecstasy. She’d known Sam for less than twenty-four hours but her appetite for him was insatiable and she thought as she lay in his powerful dark brown arms between all that rapture, that she would never be able to live without him again. With Sam it was fucking, not making love, although each act contained more love than Tom had given her in her whole life. And they talked. They talked so much Katie felt she’d known Sam since she was born.

She didn’t tell her parents a thing. Her father never asked about the phone call, and neither seemed to show any signs of suspecting that each time she went out she was meeting an Indian bus driver who would alternately make her laugh until she cried, and then cry out again in pleasure when he peeled off her clothes, high above town in the pines, or in the tiny wooden bed in the staff accommodation hut behind the depot.

She knew the ugly name for it of course. Indian-struck. That was what white people said when any white girl fell for a Native Canadian man. But Katie wasn’t Indian-struck at all. She was in love with Sam: the man, not the Indian, and she wanted to make sure he knew it.

The night before the Crosbys were due to leave she met him at the fire hut. She held his hands and looked into his black eyes very earnestly indeed.

She was going back to Vancouver, she said. She was going back to tell her boyfriend that it was over and then she would come straight back to Silver and be with him.

Katie braced herself for Sam to be sceptical, to dismiss her as a middle-class girl who’d used him for some rough-stuff vacation fun, and to be angry and hurt. But Sam looked straight back into her eyes, and said, ‘I know you will.’

They did what their bodies told them they had to do about four or five times, and then, exhausted, crawled back down the trail to town. Sam said goodbye at the end of her street, and walked away as if there was absolutely no doubt they would see each other again. Katie knew that was the truth.

She thought about Tom on the car journey all the way back to Vancouver, about how she could tell him without hurting him.

She loved him still, in a nostalgic kind of way. She’d been his girl almost half her adult life. A life together was taken for granted. But now the thought of him even kissing her made her wriggle with discomfort. She would tell him the moment they got back.

He called twenty minutes after they returned and said he’d made a dinner reservation in Denton’s. Where better to tell him, she thought, than in the best restaurant in town? Her parents seemed excited, asking her ridiculous questions, like, what time Tom was picking her up and what was she going to wear? Perhaps if Katie’s mind hadn’t been on Sam Hunt’s brown body and warm lips, she might have detected something was up in the Crosby household, but she slung on her green dress and grabbed a jacket when the door chimes announced Tom was there.