Muriel Gray - The Trickster

He envied Estelle Reader her grief. The grotesque and spectacular end to Joe’s life seemed to have a drama, a showmanship that gave it meaning. He could never say it to anyone, but he felt it. Sylvia’s death meant nothing to anyone but him, and even then it was more about his grief than her life. Lots of people died of cancer. The hospital in Calgary checked them in and out like library books, and nothing made those guys in white surgical trouser suits raise an eyebrow. But they would have raised an eyebrow if they’d seen Joe Reader. That made Joe’s death special and Sylvia’s ordinary, and sometimes Craig could hardly bear to think that anything about Sylvia could have been ordinary.

If anyone was ordinary it was him. At least he had been. Now though, he could hardly remember the thick-skinned unthinking cop he’d been for nearly two decades, letting the extraordinary events of life and death that were unavoidable in his job float past him as though he were immune. Not the kind of immunity that made him feel immortal. More as if he didn’t really notice he was alive. Taking things for granted. That time in Scotland, they’d walked on the beach in the Outer Hebrides and Sylvia had lain down on the cold wet sand, sifting through some shells. She’d picked ten tiny, delicate half-moon pink shells and laid them out in front of her.

‘Look. Babies’ fingernails.’

He’d crouched down behind her, his arms round her neck which was swathed in woollen scarves against the ridiculous weather, and looked at those beautiful fragile things.

She reorganized them earnestly, as though the order mattered. ‘Our baby will have tiny nails like that and you can bite them for him. Stop him scratching his face.’

Yes, he’d thought. That’s right. We will. No doubt about anything. The McGees were married, they would have children and they would grow old and proud of those children. That’s how life went.

Craig was not superstitious then and nor was he now, but the memory of the gust of wind that ripped across the sands on that huge, freezing, empty beach, came back to him often, the wet wind that had whipped away those paper-thin shells and made Sylvia laugh as she tried in vain to gather them up again. He thought about that a lot now. His life, no longer on those invisible oiled rails that carry a person through without having to ponder direction, was now as fragile as those shells. The wind would come, he knew, and swipe him away too. And what kind of wind would it be? Joe’s had been a hurricane. A huge, angry hurricane. That’s the way Joe went, and he was jealous. Joe, Joe, Joe. Must keep thinking about Joe.

The murder on the Redhorn reserve could be nothing or something. But he was anxious to know, and by the time they viewed the squat grey town of Stoke beneath them, he was bursting with impatience.

Daniel had been quiet throughout the journey, the pair of them sitting like eavesdroppers as the police radio occasionally spat out other people’s conversations. When he spoke, they had been silent for at least three-quarters of an hour.

‘You ever police a reserve, sir?’

Craig was hauled back from the pit of his thoughts.

‘Nope. Ten years in Vancouver, two in Banff, eight in Silver.’

It was Craig’s turn to be defensive now. ‘Why do you ask? Does it make me a bad cop ’cause I didn’t spend twenty years chasing illicit whisky stills and locking up wife-beaters?’

Daniel didn’t smile. ‘Guess not. It’s just a different kind of police work, that’s all.’

‘And you’re saying this because …?’

Daniel made a dismissive movement with his shoulders. ‘Sometimes what white cops think is abnormal on a reserve is pretty normal for the Indians who live there.’

‘Like wife-beating and child-abuse.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Bull shit. Violence and abuse isn’t normal anywhere, Hawk. I don’t give a damn if it’s an Indian, a Caucasian or a fucking Martian. Anyone who jumps the bones of their five-year-old needs locking up till they rot.’

‘Sure. But they don’t see it that way.’

‘Big deal. Who cares how they see it? They have to learn to stop doing it.’

Constable Hawk sighed and shifted in his seat. ‘Yeah, but that attitude’s not going to help you if you have to get them to co-operate.’

Craig snorted and put his hands up in mock surrender. ‘No. No you’re right. Hey, it’s okay to beat your woman into a pile of bloody mush if you just tell me everything you know about this corpse. Is that what you’re saying? Is it?’

Daniel shook his head as if Craig was a lost cause. ‘Listen, I’m no social worker. I just know a lot about these people since I am one of these people.’

‘No you’re not, Constable Hawk. You’re a Kinchuinick Indian, but you’re not a filthy piece of scum who fucks kids and hits women. Try to separate the two. Native Canadians don’t have exclusive rights to those crimes. Whites do it too.’

Daniel looked impassive. ‘And a lot more besides.’

‘Yeah. A lot more besides. But our behaviour doesn’t excuse theirs. We’re all human. We’re all trying to be better at it.’

They were arriving in town and Daniel gratefully peeled off from the traffic and headed for the Stoke Detachment. It was a low, modern building in the centre of town, the compound piled high with snow that wasn’t going anywhere until spring. Daniel pulled up to the line of Crown Vics abandoned outside and stepped on the foot brake.

‘You want me to wait here sir?’

‘No, constable. I want you to come with me.’

Hawk reached for his hat and put it on while Craig studied his face.

‘You don’t want to see this stuff again, do you?’

‘Part of the job I guess.’

They left the car and walked up the concrete ramp to the door. Part of the job, yes. But Constable Hawk could have lived without it.

‘That’s it, Craig.’

The file, a thin one, slapped onto the table.

Sergeant Cochrane rested his hand on the metal back of Craig’s chair, looking over his shoulder at the pastel green cardboard cover.

‘Thanks, Bob. Any chance of a coffee?’

‘Sure. Dan, you know where it is. How’s about it?’

Daniel Hawk took the hint gratefully and left the interview room. Bob Cochrane sat down on the other chair as Craig flicked open the file.

Hawk was right. Not similar. Identical.

The photos and the autopsy report told the same story. The corpse, found in a buckskin sack, had been slit up the spine, the organs removed, the heart stuffed up the anus, the penis in the mouth. Twenty years had concealed a lot of detail, but miraculously the body was mummified and still sufficiently intact to tell a tale. A man. They thought about fortyish and possibly, though not definitely, Indian. Interviews with almost every family on the reserve and surprise, surprise, nobody knew anything.

The ground the body had been buried in was unusual in two ways. Firstly, in its extreme dryness – almost pure sand, in fact. A geologist would recognize it as the million-year-old, raised dry remains of the Horn River bed, whose modern course now ran peacefully only a quarter of a mile away. That had been the factor that left the poor bastard looking like Tutankhamun. Even Craig knew that extremely wet or arid land leaves bodies even hundreds of years old whole enough to shake hands with. This corpse’s skin was stretched tight like parchment with barely an inch tainted by decay or infestation, leaving the grisly evidence of what had happened to it well preserved. The other unusual factor was that the ground was sacred. That was interesting to Craig. There had been big trouble from some of the elders when the chief had chosen that ground as the sight of the rodeo centre. It had been in the local rag. Everyone knew Chief Powderhand was a corrupt old piece of ass-wipe and the money he would cream off the rodeo centre made the sacred nature of the ground a joke. What chance did the spirit world have against the mighty buck? Powderhand drove a big shiny Buick and wore suits, and no amount of protest from the elders and their supporters could stop him if he wanted to do something. He held the purse-strings and even though the visitor could be forgiven for thinking Redhorn was one of the poorest places in Canada, it was a pretty full purse. Strange how none of it got to anyone on the reserve. Not until the chief’s elections rolled round that is, when suddenly there was a lot of coinage kicking around to those who voted the right way.