Читать книгу The Trickster - Muriel Gray, Muriel Gray - Страница 19

He had seen that movie, The Wizard of Oz, many times before. It was always on at Christmas, when they would sit round the big old teak-boxed TV in his sister-in-law’s place, drinking beer solemnly and silently.

Calvin Bitterhand thought it was a pretty special movie, but the bit he liked the most was when the woman with the braids saw the big green city for the first time. Viewed it across some poppy fields as far as he recalled. The first time he saw Calgary he thought it was just like the green city. Not on account of being green, which it wasn’t, but the way the big tall buildings stuck straight out of the prairie, huddling together as though height was a crime on such a pool-table flat land. But then maybe all cities looked like that. This was the only one he’d ever been to. It sure didn’t look much like the green city when you were inside it though.

Right now, as he leaned against a mail-box on Centre Street, watching passers-by alter their route to walk round him like there was an invisible fence in a semi-circle ringing his sixty-one-year-old body, he thought it was a cruel and terrible place.

Five hours to go before the hostel opened up. That meant five hours trying to panhandle a few coins that could get him inside somewhere out of the biting cold that was threatening to lose him a few more fingers. The fact that it was around minus ten even here on the sunny street meant nothing to these folks. They’d just stepped out of a heated car or a heated building and were experiencing the cold as a minor inconvenience until they were back in their offices, their shops or their vehicles, and warm again.

To him the cold was a very real enemy. It had nearly killed him a couple of times. Worst one was two winters ago, in that alley in Chinatown. He’d hung around the trash cans behind a restaurant, hoping the men who came out of the kitchens for a smoke would give him food, tobacco, or in his wildest dreams, a drink. A Chinese guy in the hostel told him they sometimes did that. Didn’t tell him that they only did it for other Chinese, that they shooed Indians away like rats. The manager had come out, shouting at the smoking men in a burst of short, fast, staccato noise and then, seeing Calvin, pushed him roughly against some crates by the wall. Calvin’s tank was already reading full on a vicious moonshine he’d bought from another hostel Indian, Silas Labelle, and the push had made him topple and fall heavily behind the crates. That’s all he remembered.

The Eagle woke him up. Told him he was going to die if he didn’t try and move. Of course he didn’t want to move. He was comfortable and warm there, lying on the ground in the alley, but his spirit guide was real insistent. They flew together for a while, low over the reserve, where the children were playing by the river, and then high up into the mountains, circling in the sun with the snowy peaks glittering beneath them, until the Eagle said it was time to go back.

And he had come back, drowsy with hypothermia, two of his exposed fingers lost forever to frostbite, but alive. He’d stumbled from behind the crates, out of the alley into the street, where someone had found him and called the cops. Calvin’s left hand was now like a pig’s trotter, a remaining thumb, first and little finger serving him as best they could.

But then it was never required to do much more these days than hold the brown bag while he unscrewed the top of a bottle. Not like the old days, when his hands had had many tasks to do. Then, they gathered herbs for his magic in the woods. They cast bones and mixed powders. They took the gifts that people brought and handed over the potions they needed. Often they ran over his wife’s body and gave him pleasure. But they never held his children. The Eagle had told him many times that there would be no children. Maybe children would have stopped what had happened to him on the reserve. But maybe not.

Two businessmen were getting out of a cab on his side of the road, and Calvin hoped they would come this way and give him money. He held out his hand as they passed and the older man hesitated, put his hand into his big, warm, brown coat pocket in a hurried gesture, and threw him a dollar. The men looked away, embarrassed, as the tossed coin tinkled onto the sidewalk and Calvin bent his stiff, sore body to retrieve it. A drink would help him now, easing both the cold and his humiliation, but he hadn’t had a drink in a week. The Eagle had been quite clear about that. He had to be strong now. There had been enough self-pity, enough hiding in the sweet, deadening anaesthetic of alcohol. He needed thinking-time to decide what he was going to do about the Hunting Wolf boy.

Forty years ago of course, there would have been little to consider. He wouldn’t have taken a week to think and act: he would have known exactly how to handle this emergency. Calvin Bitterhand had been the only medicine man on Redhorn, the twenty-five square miles of Kinchuinick reserve. His house was right in the middle of Redhorn, the central village, and he had another cabin high in the hills, where he spent months practising his art and gathering herbs. They were all believers then. Sure, the white man had corrupted the tribe with his bribes and lies, turning the chief and his flunkies into puppets for their own political use. But the rest of them, the five bands who lived out their lives there, they were still Kinchuinicks, still knew who they were.

Life had been good for Calvin. He’d learned his art from the greatest of medicine men – a shaman – Eden Hunting Wolf. When Calvin’s prayers at puberty for a spirit guide had brought him the Eagle, Eden James Hunting Wolf had sought him out and taken him away from the Bitterhand band to train as his assistant. There was never any question that Calvin would be the next medicine man. Not with the Eagle choosing him. Hit Eden’s son, Moses, pretty bad though, and Eden had to sit Moses down and explain that the spirits chose whom they wished. Moses said he’d dreamed the Eagle had been his guide too, but Eden said he was lying, and Calvin could see from Moses’ face that he had been. Eden had been harsh with his son.

‘The wolf is your guide, son of mine. The wolf and nothing else. You deny him at your peril. Go now, fast for four days and run with him across our land, listening to what he tells you, seeing what he shows you. Then return and we will speak again.’

Eden had then dismissed his son and his protestations with a wave. But Moses did not build a sweat lodge or fast. Moses had sulked like a child half his age and grew distant from his father and resentful of Calvin. How he would laugh if he could see the great medicine man now, scrambling on the concrete for a thrown coin, nearly dead with cold, hunger and a liver that was ready to explode. But it was unlikely that Moses Hunting Wolf would laugh, unless laughter could come from the grave.

The wind, as if reminding him of the present, caught the hem of Calvin’s matted, stained coat and made it flutter like a diving kite.

No point in thinking about the old days and how he was respected and revered. It was now he had to think about, the last act perhaps he could perform for his people, and possibly the most important. Why, he had asked the Eagle, why would you ask an old drunk to do this? What use am I to my people? My powers have long since drowned in my impurity. But there had been no answer. It was essential. He was the only one left, and he must do it. He must do it soon.

Calvin held the dollar in his good hand and thought about how to spend it. There was a coffee shop over on First Street that wasn’t fussy who they let in. He would go in there and get warm. He needed to be warm to think.

Such great cliffs of mirrored buildings downtown, and not enough room in any of them to let Calvin Bitterhand in out of the biting wind and deadly creeping cold. The Calgary Tower peered impassively at him over the skyscrapers, standing sentinel like a white man’s totem, as he walked unsteadily along the street.

Calvin walked like a cripple, his feet dragging from ankles that were swollen and bitten by vermin, but he clutched the dollar, still warm from the businessman’s pocket, as though it held the secret to life.

The girl in the coffee shop thought about not serving him for a moment, then thought again and took his money. He found a stool in the corner and waited. She took her time, watching him out of the corner of her eye, and after what seemed like an eternity, sauntered down to his end of the counter with the jug and poured him his coffee.

Calvin cupped the mug in both hands, feeling its heat before he put it to his lips. He swallowed the hot liquid, savouring the delicious sensation as it slid down his throat into the freezing empty core of his body. He would be able to think now. He had to decide today. He knew he was already late.

It had been a week now. Seven days since he’d blacked out and had the vision; but its pungency had left a mark on his heart and on his dreams. The problem was how to get to Moses’s son before the evil went too far. That was his task. He’d flown with the Eagle to where Sam and his family lived in Silver, soaring high above the town until he’d spotted the Hunting Wolf boy going about his business, and he’d seen the great and terrible blackness there. It had been like looking down on a great black hole in the land, shooting up from the ground in a column that was growing and extending, threatening to darken the entire town. But it was two hundred miles away. And what use would he be if he got there?

Calvin looked round the room from behind his mug of coffee. None of these people would ever be safe again if he didn’t act. That darkness would reach them all eventually, one way or another, once it had been released for good. Did he care? They certainly didn’t care about him. He saw himself through their eyes. A useless, drunken old grey-haired Indian, stinking of his own dried urine, a face lined by abuse and tragedy, wearing clothes that were like diseased and peeling skins instead of fabric. He was no saviour. But the Great Spirit, he knew, cared about them all; the girl behind the counter, the two surly young men in the corner in leather jackets and jeans, the working man on the next stool wearing the overalls of an elevator company, and Calvin Bitterhand. Loved them without question or prejudice. Prejudice was man’s invention.

Yes, even though the people in this room would never know that he thought of himself as their brother, it was his duty to act on their behalf. What else could he do? To ignore the Eagle and stay would mean life would go on as normal. He could peacefully spend the last few years of his life as scum on the streets, drinking himself nearer death and crying himself to sleep in doorways.

He must go to Silver and he must go now. But he was not pure enough to face what he knew was waiting for him. Nineteen years had passed since he’d left the reserve, and in all those years he’d never performed a sun dance, or fasted, not even prayed. He was tainted with self-abuse. Broken by booze. There was only one solution. Penance. He would walk. If he didn’t make the two hundred miles, then the Great Spirit had other plans for him. But he was going to try.

Calvin swallowed the last of his coffee and managed a weak smile at the girl moving some cakes around the display.

‘Want another, chief?’

He shook his head, climbed slowly and painfully off his stool and walked over to where she stood on the other side of the plastic-covered counter. She stopped toying with her cakes and straightened up to confront him. Calvin put his hands on the counter to steady himself, noticing her eyes flicking to the gaps where his fingers used to be. He held up his head and spoke to her softly.

‘I have a long journey now. No more money. You give me food?’

The waitress, Marie-Anne MacDonald, looked back at him and found herself hesitating. Normally she gave old bums the treatment they deserved. If they couldn’t pay they hit the street. You slipped one of them an old danish or a doughnut past its sell-by, and before you knew where you were you had a string of them hanging around the door expecting to be fed like dogs. It was her butt on the line and if Jack came in and saw her giving charity to any old scrounger it would certainly be her who’d get it in the neck. Okay, it wasn’t a great job, but it was a job. The shop shut at four so she had all afternoon to watch the soaps and then get ready to go out with Alan. Suited her fine, and she wasn’t going to lose it for a bum. Anyway, these people could work if they wanted to. They just didn’t want to. Look at her. She had to work didn’t she? Sure, she’d like to stand around all day drinking, but she came in here at seven-thirty every day to earn her crust, and she hated these Indian bums who thought life owed them a living. She let them in so she could take their money off them, the money they’d begged from some sucker, and then throw them out when they got comfortable. Marie-Anne sometimes wished she could teach the useless pigs that white people weren’t all one big welfare cheque.

At least that was the rule she lived by normally. This guy was different. When he looked at her just then, his black shiny eyes fixing her with a stare, there was no self-pity in them, no pleading or cajoling. More like defiance, as if he were ordering her to do something she knew she had to but had forgotten.

And she caught a strange scent from him, not of piss and liquor, but of a fresh wind and trees, the way washed sheets smell when they’ve been out on the line blowing in the spring breeze.

Made her think of when she was little and she and her father picnicked on the Bow River, way out of town. The mountains were like a jagged cut-out in the distance, and she would run through the pines, laughing as she fell in the long grass in the clearing between the trees. The smell was the same. Green, wet, fresh, delicious.

Marie-Anne, still looking into Calvin’s watery black eyes, put a hand absently into the refrigerated display case in the front of the counter, scooped eight cling-wrapped sandwiches into a bag and handed it to him.

Calvin took it, nodded to her and slowly, wearily, left the shop. She watched him go, transfixed as his hunched figure pushed the door open and shuffled past the window out of sight.

Eight sandwiches. She was in for it if she couldn’t account for how eight sandwiches walked right out of the cool shelf. Each one was worth a dollar sixty, in fact one had been a jumbo shrimp mayo, worth two dollars seventy-five. Without thinking she went into her pocket book under the coffee machine, took out thirteen dollars and put them in the till. Jack would never know. The elevator maintenance man called for another cup of coffee and Marie-Anne went to pour it, with a smile on her face that would last her until closing, although then, as now, she couldn’t tell you why.