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Sam had him in his arms before the yell died on the boy’s lips. He held the small panting body close to his chest, rubbing his back with a large hand.
Billy’s tears came. ‘Dad. Make them stop. They have to stop.’
‘It’s just a dream Billy. Nothing’s happening.’
‘It is happening Dad. You have to warn them.’
Sam hugged him closer. ‘Okay. Okay. You tell me, and I’ll make them stop.’
Billy was sobbing, his whole body heaving under its Calgary Flames T-shirt. ‘They’re gonna let it go, Dad. You can’t let them.’
‘Who is, Billy? What are they going to let go?’
The boy started to cry again. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. The wolf told me. I just know it’s going to be bad. I saw them. Two of them.’
Sam rocked him back and forward, his hand now stroking Billy’s hair. He sat that way for a minute or more. ‘Sshhh now. I’ll stop them. It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep.’
But he was already asleep. In fact, Sam wondered if he’d been awake at all. Billy’s body was a dead weight in his arms, breathing steadily, arms hanging at his side.
Gently Sam let Billy back down onto the pillow and pulled the comforter up to his chin. He stood by the bed for a while, waiting to see if Billy would go back to the dark place he’d been in, but the crisis was over for now. From downstairs, a roar of indignation reminded him of his other duties, and he walked slowly out of the room, retrieving the wine as he went.
Looked like he hadn’t missed much. Ann was hard at it.
‘Well you can say that, but the kids I teach, and the kids Gerry teaches, haven’t a fucking clue what the whole movement was about.’
Katie was in a corner, holding the lions back with a chair. ‘Then it’s your duty to remind them. Unless you want all those little guys to grow up thinking they rule the world.’
Claire laughed sarcastically. ‘They do Katie. And they will.’
Sam picked up the corkscrew, opened the bottle and started filling glasses. ‘Yep, we do. Take it in turns as it happens. When it’s my turn I’m going to make it illegal to have waiters tell you their names before they bring the menu.’
Marty and Katie laughed. Claire was annoyed not to be taken seriously. ‘Yeah. Cute.’ She paused, taking stock. ‘Now I don’t know you Sam. In fact, this is the first time I’ve met you. But I’d say you’re an old-style kind of guy. Am I right, Katie?’
Claire picked up the wine glass that Sam had filled, and half-emptied it again.
Katie looked up at Sam with love. ‘No. You’re wrong. He’s cool.’
Claire was undeterred. ‘Gerry, Ann, help me out here. You’ve been friends with Sam and Katie how long?’
Gerry smiled and made a space between his palms that stretched, the way a fisherman lies about his catch.
‘So is this guy for or against women?’
Sam took his seat again, and looked cheerfully round the company with a smile of comic innocence. He beamed across at Katie. ‘Oh go on, honey. Tell them how I leave you the key to the chastity belt when I travel.’
Katie smiled again. ‘Yeah, but leaving it in the men’s washroom at the Bus Depot doesn’t count.’
Claire didn’t laugh. She folded her face into a mask of censure. ‘You know, in my job women have eighty-five per cent less chance of promotion than men. Eighty-five per cent. That’s no joke.’
Sam took a swig of soda. ‘Don’t that put you right off being a lumberjack then?’
Everyone laughed this time, and the fact that Marty sniggered into his wine let Claire out of the cage. She ran a finger round the top of her glass. ‘I would have thought that given your background, Sam, you’d be slightly more sympathetic to a statistic like that.’
Katie shot Sam a glance. Sam held Claire’s gaze.
‘Sorry. Not with you.’
‘No. I’m sorry. Sorry if I’m the one to remind you that Native Canadians don’t do too hot in the promotion stakes. That is if they can get a job at all.’
Sam looked steadily at her. ‘I got a job.’
Marty put a hand on Claire’s. ‘Claire.’
She pulled her hand away. ‘No, come on folks. Let’s face up to it here. What kind of a job have you got exactly, Sam? A good job?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh well pardon me once again. Gerry led me to believe you were a manual groomer. Not exactly executive status, unless Silver Ski Company’s started recruiting from Harvard.’
Sam said nothing.
Claire softened her voice, and if the intention by doing so was to paper over the cracks, it was wasted.
‘Look, all I’m saying is that I know how you people must feel. I’m a woman. I get shit on too.’
Sam looked into his soda like there was something dead in there. ‘I can believe that. The last part anyway.’
Marty wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Okay, time we were hitting the road. Listen, it was real nice meeting you. We’re staying with Gerry and Ann another week. Maybe we can all ski together.’
Katie was still looking at Sam. She slipped a hand beneath the table and wound her fingers between his. ‘Yeah. That’d be neat. I don’t know if we can take time off, but if we can, sure.’
Sam looked across at Claire. ‘If we can’t, I sure look forward to sweeping the snow off your car.’
Marty stood up, and the others followed his example, scraping their chairs on the wooden floor, and fussing over their possessions. Marty moved round the table, kissed Katie and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, Sam. Lighten up. Everyone’s a little gassed.’
Sam nodded solemnly.
There were polite noises made and Katie herded everyone out without the assistance of her husband who remained seated, staring into the middle of the abandoned table. He heard the door close and their footsteps crunching in the drive, and was aware of Katie standing behind him, leaning against the doorframe.
‘She was a jerk. Wasn’t it enough to just let her be one and leave it at that?’
‘Should have been.’
Katie pulled up a chair beside him and put her head on his shoulder. He slipped his arm round her.
‘I didn’t even get to serve the after-dinner mints.’
‘I should do it for a living, huh? Dinner parties cleared in minutes. Call Freephone 0800 Sam Hunt.’
‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
Sam sighed. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been kind of cranky all day.’
Katie undid the top three buttons of Sam’s silk shirt, ran her hand over the bone amulet he wore round his neck on a leather thong, and let her hand rest on his warm belly.
‘In fact cancel cranky. Replace with asshole.’
‘Can I help?’
He smiled down at the blue eyes in her pale oval face; the face of a Victorian china doll.
‘Sure. You can load the dishwasher.’
She guffawed and bit his shoulder. He lifted her head and kissed her small rosy mouth.
When Sam and Katie Hunt got to bed an hour later the dishwasher was still empty. The cushions on the sofa however, were going to need some recovery time.
Billy heard his parents climb the stairs and lay awake in the dark listening to their hushed voices as they turned off the hall lights.
His forehead was beaded with sweat and his hands were fists, clenching and unclenching across his chest. He knew he’d had a bad dream, nothing more, but the taste of it was still with him. Lying awake now, he wondered why he didn’t call out to his parents, bring them into his room to sit on his bed and talk to him in calm voices. But he didn’t want to see his parents right now. He wanted to see Bart. The wolf had told him to trust Bart, but Bart was in the yard, banished nightly from the house. Billy waited until he heard Sam and Katie’s door close gently. He gave it a minute and then reached out and turned on his bedside light.
He paused to see if the light from his room would bring an enquiry from next door, and when it didn’t he slipped out of bed and pulled on his plaid jacket.
Finding a torch in the toy box and opening his door carefully, Billy picked his way downstairs and through the house to the kitchen door by the light of the slim beam.
The sky was clear outside, a million stars glittering behind the black jagged silhouette of the mountains. Bart was standing outside his kennel, ears high, nostrils blowing clouds of vapour, face staring towards Wolf Mountain. There was only a tiny twitch of recognition and a small noise from the back of the animal’s throat when Billy knelt beside him and put his arms round Bart’s thick spiky coat.
Boy and dog looked out towards the mountain. Upstairs man, woman and child slept.
5 (#ulink_9aad464f-e9d5-567b-a9a4-8adc556a8c80)
Lenny Sadowitz shifted a rogue piece of gum from between his cheek and back teeth before squinting up at the mountain, preparing to holler at his colleague.
‘C’mon, Jim. I got a life to lead!’
The word lead bounced off the rock, returning to his ears in a thin piping voice barely recognizable as his own. He watched his breath swirl in front of him, blew a few rings of frozen air, sucked the cold between his teeth and continued to chew. He leaned forward on the handlebars of the snow cat and watched his companion’s silhouette move silently between the other cat and the unexploded charge he was investigating.
Lenny hated being on avalanche rota. What was the point of being a ski patroller if you ended up miles away from the action on the trails, stuck in godforsaken gullies like this one with as much chance of getting some skiing in as Jim had of pulling that dreamboat waitress in T.J.’s Diner?
Having a white cross on your back impressed the public. It did nothing for the coyotes and the whiskeyjacks, and that was all there was for company in this part of the mountain.
This whole exercise was getting on Lenny’s tits. Why they should have to avalanche the cliffs on Wolf was anyone’s guess. If the loading slopes were a risk to the railroad, then the frigging railroad workers should come up here and blast them themselves. Lenny sure didn’t recall railroad maintenance as part of his job description when he signed up as a patroller.
He glared down the cliff at the thin track just visible between the tunnel mouths, and expelled a white globe of spit in its direction.
Lenny pushed his Ray-Bans up onto his forehead, narrowed his eyes and looked back up at his partner with disgust. The rule was that unexploded avalanche bombs get their location noted and then stay put until spring, when the patrollers simply wander over and pick them up out of the grass. Digging around in eight feet of powder for something the size of a shoe box is not a sensible course of action, especially when that shoe box could just blow your legs off. Not good enough for Jim. He knew where the bomb was and he was damned if he was going to let it lie there until the snows melted.
This was the second bitching day they’d been at this. Jim had thrown the charge yesterday, delighting in the formality of shouting fire in the hole! and then was puzzled and disappointed by its failure to detonate. He knew any danger of it exploding now was nil.
No, stubborn curiosity and a determination to put his house in order were the factors that made Jim decide to go and fetch that wayward bomb, before they carried on with their legitimate day’s work, to blast the bollocks out of the double black diamond run down Spangle Couloir. That’s where Lenny wanted to be, and that’s where Jim was stopping him being.
Jim’s fascination with explosives made Lenny despise him more. Jim was the incendiary expert in the resort but he was a pig on skis. Lenny and the two other guys who took turns to help out ‘lanching in the high season, got all the revenge they needed for being pulled off the trails to do this shit by scoring with any girl Jim looked at sideways. Girls don’t care much about dynamite when they get a chance of a guy with a tan and thighs like iron.
‘Aw Christ. What is he doing up there?’
Lenny got off the snow cat, sinking up to his knees in the soft snow, and cupped his gloved hands to a mouth ringed with white lip salve. ‘Jimbo! I’m losing toes down here. Get a fuckin’ move on!’
He saw the stooping figure of Jim look up, and then Lenny felt the explosion an age before he heard it.
Jim’s body dissolved rather than blew apart. His flesh pushed tennis-ball-sized holes in his Goretex smock, and the face that he had washed for twenty-six years and shaved for ten, remained nearly intact as the skull to which it had been attached splintered into a macabre approximation of a fibre-filled breakfast cereal. Lenny had just enough time to watch one of Jim’s arms windmilling through the air on its own like a stick you threw the dog.
Before the pieces that made up Jim McKenzie could attempt a landing, they were lost in the fountain of snow and rock that was heading towards Lenny. He didn’t run or shout, but then that would have been hard with only half a face left, the eye on the remainder of his face hanging uselessly down his cheek. The rock hit him on the left side of the head, knocking him sideways, and as his exposed brains quivered, ready to obey gravity, the snow melted into every orifice, as though it were disinfecting the wounds.
Six heli-skiers on their way to some dream powder in the back country saw the explosion from the air and thought nothing of it. The pilot, Abe Foster, thought a great deal about it. Avalanche explosions are small, and the avalanches they cause rumble, roll and then stop. This was a mother of a bang, with plumes of thick black smoke spiralling up from Wolf Mountain as though terrorists had hit an oil terminal. The whole hill seemed to be disintegrating.
Abe took the chopper up another five hundred feet and banked west to take a better look. It was bad. Christ help any poor sucker in the vicinity of a blow like that. Abe got on the radio and called patrol, then turned the chopper round, and, ignoring the whining from his dumb-assed stock-broker passengers, headed back to Silver.
Getting the kids out of the house was like playing with one of those mercury-filled hand-games where you tilt the piece of plastic until you manoeuvre the shiny sliver of liquid metal into a hole. Every time Sam shovelled a son into a coat and herded him into the back of the Toyota, a daughter had taken her coat off and was back amongst the wreckage of the breakfast table.
He was never very good at those hand-games, and he was no better at rounding his family up.
Sam Hunt was losing his temper. He stood in the driveway, his hands on his hips, as Jess waved happily to him from the kitchen window clutching a piece of toast in a starfish hand.
‘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.
