Muriel Gray - The Trickster

‘And what’s that?’

‘That Joe was half-blood Cree and I’m full Kinchuinick, so we must have been best of buddies. That’s what you’re getting at isn’t it? The only Indians, even half-Indians, in the detachment, and we’re bound to stick together.’

Craig lowered his eyes. ‘Come on, Hawk. That’s not what I meant.’

‘I think it’s exactly what you meant. Sir.’

Daniel Hawk was right of course, but Craig wasn’t going to let his clumsy mishandling of the constable stand in the way of what he wanted to know. ‘Okay.’ He gave in softly, paused again, thinking. ‘I just wondered if there was anything cultural, anything particular to Native Canadians I wouldn’t know. Something that might have escaped me.’

Daniel Hawk continued to look straight ahead. Craig, over his embarrassment now, was starting to get annoyed. ‘Aw Christ, Hawk. I’m fucking sorry if it’s not politically correct to notice the fact that you and Joe happened to share some Indian blood.’

‘We didn’t. I repeat. He was half-Cree. I’m full Kinchuinick.’

‘Whatever. Quit acting like I just swindled Manhattan off you for a dollar and answer the question. Was there anything going on with Joe I should know about?’

Constable Hawk threw him that look again, then decided he’d turned the knife enough. He looked at last like he was thinking instead of brooding. ‘Nah. Nothing. He was pretty stable with Estelle and all. I didn’t notice anything weird.’

Hawk’s boss nodded solemnly. It was just as Craig thought. He’d have known if there had been anything wrong with his sergeant. It was just that niggling little maggot of insecurity that white cops have when dealing with Indians that made Craig even bring the topic up. He was sorry he had to. He never thought of Joe as anything but Joe. And whether Daniel Hawk believed it or not, he thought only of him as a damned good constable. So what that they’d been the only two Native Canadians in the detachment? The detachment also boasted one Sikh, a German and a half-Japanese. It was worth checking. Anything was worth checking. They had precious little else to go on.

Daniel drove on in silence but he was still thinking. Craig could practically hear the wheels turning in there.

‘What? There’s something. Isn’t there?’

Hawk shook his head. ‘Nah. It’s nothing about Joe. It’s the cultural bit that made me think of something.’

‘Tell me.’ Craig was hungry for it. Whatever it was.

Daniel looked grim, fighting to analyse whatever it was he’d conjured up.

‘Okay, like I say, it’s probably nothing. In fact, given the time involved it’s absolutely, definitely, nothing. But the way Joe died. It made me think of something else. That’s all.’

Craig turned his body towards Daniel. ‘Go on.’

‘I saw something like it. While I was policing on Redhorn. But it happened around twenty years ago.’

Craig tried to work it out. Daniel Hawk was only thirty-five years old, tops. How could he have presided over a murder at the tender age of fifteen? They were recruiting young into the Mounties, but not that young.

‘I don’t understand, Hawk. What do you mean you saw it?’

‘I said the murder happened over twenty years ago. That’s what the forensics guys came up with. We only found the mutilated remains of the body six years ago. It got dug up by some white construction guys who were pile-driving for the new rodeo centre. Course if it’d been found by Indians it would never have been reported. That’s the Kinchuinick way. Keeps the reserve a tight community. Makes police work almost impossible. The person, whoever it was, hadn’t even been reported missing.’

Craig tried to work this out. ‘So you uncovered an old body killed over two decades ago that was similar in its disfigurement to Joe’s injuries?’

‘Not similar. Identical.’

‘Indian?’

‘They couldn’t say for sure. No dental records or nothing.’ He looked across at Craig. ‘Contrary to popular white Canadian myth, we’re kinda the same as you under the skin.’

Craig ran a hand over his mouth, ignoring the dig. ‘Why didn’t you mention this?’

‘I only thought of it recently. I’ve been wondering if it’s relevant.’

Craig exhaled. ‘Fuck.’

‘Sorry. It just didn’t seem that important.’

‘Where are the Native Police files kept, Hawk? At Redhorn?’

‘Yeah. The Tribal Administrator keeps them, but since the Mounties from Stoke were called in they got them too.’

‘Remember the year?’

‘Sure. Larry was born that year. 1987.’

Craig drummed the dash impatiently, his desire to have that file on his knee right now, eating at him like a hunger. The traffic was as terrible as the snow. The tailback behind the plough stretched for at least a quarter of a mile, every vehicle apart from theirs revealing by their ski racks that they contained humans in the search for fun and thrills in this white stuff. Daniel looked across at him and read his discomfort.

‘You still want me to head for the site?’

‘No. Carry on to Stoke.’

Daniel nodded as if reprimanded and fixed his eyes on the road again. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing those photos again, but it served him right for bringing back the whole sorry affair. Maybe the Kinchuinick way was best. Maybe he should have kept his trap shut. But then he wasn’t really a Kinchuinick any more. He was a policeman.

Constable Benson, stamping his feet in the snow, raised a heavily-gloved hand to the Ford as they cruised past the taped-off site. Daniel waved back. It was wilderness up there. The Trans-Canada and the rail track sneaked over this high pass like intruders, as if they knew man had little right to be here and should think twice about leaving his mark. This was the highest point, and from here they could cruise all the way back down to Stoke, still trailing the city skiers as they slid about after the plough.

Craig had driven up and down here about two dozen times since the murder. If he was waiting for that movie-cop’s moment of divine inspiration he was going to have to wait a long time. Nothing about being there, about experiencing the physical presence of Wolf Pass and its inaccessibility to the pedestrian, lit a fire under his cold, empty ignorance.

This was new territory. There had only ever been one murder in his time in Silver. A pathetic, sad murder: a summer tourist battered to death in a rage by a drunk redneck from the mines up north, allegedly for insulting his girlfriend. Ugly and savage. Sylvia’s death had been neither. It had been what they described as peaceful. Craig disagreed. There was somehow more peace in brutality, a natural order where the ripping or tearing of flesh logically and visibly resulted in the escape of the human life-force from its prison of solid matter. The insidious creeping death in which the body was attacked from within was to him a thousand times more violent. He did not associate the hollow white cheeks of his once rosy-skinned wife with any form of peace.

When the doctor had told him, in that stupid pink-carpeted room in the hospital, full of plants and shit as if that made what got said in there any better, that Sylvia’s cancer was in the womb and that it would be a matter of days, he’d experienced a kind of elation. It was anger, and unimaginable grief, but it fired him up. He would go in there and get that cancer the way he went out and pulled in a thief. Yes, it would all be okay. Staff Sergeant Craig McGee to the rescue. We Always Get Our Man. Except you couldn’t arrest cancer. She’d died so doped up with morphine Craig doubted if she’d even known he was there. But he was. He held her cool thin hand as she let out one small breath and never took another. That was her death. Banal and pointless. He didn’t even call the nurse, just sat and looked at her, knowing it was over, that she’d gone. What was that garbage some writer said about not really dying, just going into another room? She was dead. There was, as far as Craig was concerned, no other room. This life was the only room there ever was, and Sylvia had left it and shut the door quietly behind her.