Late Nights on Air (2 page)

A rudimentary place of ten thousand people named after an indigenous tribe that used knives made of copper, and in many ways it was a white blot on the native landscape. But it was as far north as most southerners had ever come. It was north of the sixtieth parallel and shared in the romance of the North, emanating not mystery but uniqueness and not right away. It had no breathtaking scenery. No mountains, no glaciers, in the winter not even that much snow. But after a while it grew on them, on some of them at least, on the ones who would never forget, who would think back on their lives and say, My time there was the most vivid time in my life.

Only two stoplights, perhaps, but such a traffic in voices. That summer a small but steady parade of poets came through town, unconnected to the parade of experts addressing Judge Berger at his inquiry into what would be, if it went ahead, the largest
single development project ever undertaken in the Western world, a gas pipeline running across the top of the Arctic and down the eight-hundred-mile-length of the Mackenzie River. Politics overshadowed poetry, as it always does. The poets came one at a time throughout the summer, a modest incursion and the first of its kind, organized by a local poetry lover and financed by the national council for the arts. The pipeline experts came in droves, it seemed, gathering at the gleaming white Explorer Hotel that dominated the road on the way to the airport. It was a time when Yellowknife was on the map, when the North was on everyone’s minds, when the latest scheme to extract its riches had gained so much ground that this summer of 1975 took on the mythical quality of a cloudless summer before the outbreak of war, or before the onset of the kind of restlessness, social, spiritual, that remakes the world.

Harry went to a few of the literary readings at the public library. He went with Eleanor, who wrote poetry for her own pleasure, until he lost patience with what he called the empty wordplay. How can a poem last, he cried, if it doesn’t touch your heart? You might remember the poet, he declared, but you won’t remember the poem. To underscore his point he typed out verses from a poem he admired and taped them to the wall in the one and only announce booth, where their message about death and its haunting aftermath was like a skull sitting on the console. The poem was by Alden Nowlan, who came from Harry’s part of southern New Brunswick, and it described the foolish time in the poet’s life when he worked alone at night in a radio station and couldn’t believe anyone was listening, for “it seemed I was talking / only to myself in a room no bigger / than an ordinary bathroom.” Then one day
he had to cover a fatal collision between a car and a train, and Nowlan the broadcaster turned into Nowlan the appalled listener. “Inside the wreckage” of the car, three young men were dead, but the car radio was still playing and “nobody could get at it” to turn it off. Across the top margin Harry scrawled,
Do you ever wonder where your voice goes?

The more personal question he avoided asking himself. How had he ended up back here, where he’d started, in the little rabbit warren of rooms known as CFYK? Sitting in the announce booth, feeling his own life collide with itself.

Eleanor was the station’s gatekeeper. From her desk she controlled access to a single hallway that led like a short main street directly through the guts of the station to an exit that tumbled you back out into the northern summer—to a garbage bin full to overflowing with tape so edited, so beknuckled and thickened with white splicing tape as to be deemed unsalvageable, finally, by the head technician in his basement lair. Crusty Andrew McNab presided over the station’s nether region of workbenches, labelled shelves, crowded corners, and his own tidy desk. For seventeen years he’d practised frugality and extravagant disdain,
fathead
being his favourite term for anyone conceited enough to go on air.

Andrew’s wasn’t the only lair. The newsroom, just large enough for two newsmen and two desks and one editing machine, was another. Its firmly closed door lay directly in the line of fire between Eleanor’s desk and the front door of the station through which the town’s characters liked to come. Mrs. Dargabble, for instance, with her lofty, loquacious, regular plea for classical music. I don’t expect opera, but a little Mozart from time to time? Eleanor couldn’t have
agreed more. She wrote down the request, then tossed it sadly into the wastebasket as soon as the poor woman turned her back, since there was no hope, she knew. No hope for Mozart in Yellowknife.

Until Harry Boyd passed by one day recently and rumbled at the hefty, flapping, fragile woman, “Do you like Lucia Popp?”

“She sings the Queen of the Night,” said the startled Mrs. Dargabble.

“Tonight I’ll play her for you. Turn on your radio at midnight.”

“You marvellous man. You under
stand
.”

By now Harry was haunting the station at all hours and it was obvious to everyone why. He wanted to be around Dido Paris.

“How will I recognize him?” Harry had asked her, his voice a-growl with mock irony and serious intent. “This fancy man of yours. Your father-in-law.”

She had a long, slow smile. “You’re a romantic, Harry.”

“I’m not ashamed of it.”

He saw her face give way once again to such tender sadness that his lonely insides twisted and tightened. But then he took heart. “You like older men.”

Dido leaned back and laughed at him. “Harry, you’re so transparent.”

He wasn’t ashamed of that either. He recognized in Dido a deep streak of melancholy that he happened to share, and he was fascinated, not least by a childhood he guessed was partly to blame. Holland after the war. Not Holland, she corrected. The Netherlands. She told him her mother sewed warm winter
pants for her from old army uniforms and she had to wear pyjamas underneath, otherwise the khaki chafed her thighs and made them bleed. At the look on his face, she smiled and touched his arm. It wasn’t so bad, she said. In a way, I didn’t mind. And you won’t believe how much I miss what I ate then, chocolate sprinkles on bread, we put the butter on top of the sprinkles to keep them in place, and speculaas—you know? the Dutch windmill cookie?—between two slices of buttered bread. I bicycled to school and took that for my lunch. Her voice had a buoyant, velvety sound. Sensual, but not so sensual it lost energy or authority. Had her father been her teacher? he wanted to know. Not officially, she said, and she grew pensive again. Her father had died quite recently, in March, still listening to the BBC. At the time of his death she’d been here, substitute teaching Math and French at the local high school, a job that merely met her need to be as far away as possible from her romantic entanglements. After her father’s death she felt impelled to rethink her life. In a first step, she came to the station offering to volunteer. “And the rest is history,” said Harry.

He couldn’t imagine this beautiful woman, whose manner he could only describe as regal, lasting very long in a town like Yellowknife. And when he asked about her intentions, she said she had no idea whether she’d even stay in Canada. “Canada” she pronounced with a certain contempt. Canadians were spoiled, she said. Look at the size and weight of their over-crammed garbage cans, the number and newness of their cars, the houses standing unoccupied, the closets bursting with clothes, the daily showers. She didn’t go on, but she could have. Her ex-husband’s family had used water as if there were
no tomorrow, but with her sense of economy and quality—in the Netherlands even a tea towel was made to last for decades—with her sense of history, tragedy, and time, she knew better than these dishwashing guzzlers, these showering fools, these lawn-lovers and land-wasters. Yellowknife, however, was different. Here, she felt that she’d stepped backwards into small-town life, especially in the unplanned old part of town where there was outdoor plumbing and the streets were unpaved and had names like Ragged Ass Road. Such a curious mixture, the city was, of brand-new and raw-old, of government buildings and beer parlours and bush planes and little shack-like houses close to the water, which seemed to lie in all directions, as did the vast wilderness. The place was full of opportunities, she said, especially if you were white and even if you were a woman.

Harry drew a map of Yellowknife for Dido, marking the location of his house on Latham Island at the far end of Old Town, not with an X but with a • like a beauty mark. And was it deliberate or unconscious, she wondered, that his rendition of the island (separated from the mainland by the narrowest of narrows) made it look like a penis with personality? An erect penis with a noticeable rightward curve. His house was near the base of the left-hand side of this curvaceous, prancing, happy, circumcised cock.

In watching him rapidly sketch the map, Dido Paris learned a few things and guessed a few others. Since Harry knew the coastline like the back of his hand, he must be a sailor, he must be happiest on water. His sketch was fast and deft and to the point. It showed no interest in the town itself,
except insofar as Franklin Avenue ran down to the tip of the island-erection that bestrode the waters of Great Slave Lake. In manly capital letters he had written GIANT on the west shore of Back Bay and CON near Yellowknife Bay to indicate the two gold mines. But his focus was on the water and on inviting her, she assumed, to take an entertaining plunge.

THE DAY AFTER HARRY BRAVED
the station in order to see Dido, a cloud of weather so warm had descended that Eleanor Dew went for a long walk before bed. She lived in the new part of town, in a basic but comfortable trailer home not far from Frame Lake. Occasionally that night she felt a cool breeze come off the water. Otherwise, warmth descended from the sky, then a little soft rain. The next morning the air outside was like one of those so-called white children—hair so blond it’s white—a heavy mist obscuring the trailer next door. She was reminded of her grandfather, who had washed his fine head of white hair once a week with Old Dutch Cleanser.

This was the day Gwen Symon came into the station for the first time, and nobody noticed. It was the third day of June, a Tuesday.

Eleanor was caught up in playful banter with Ralph Cody, the freelance book reviewer. “You’ve drunk nineteen cups of coffee already. Do you plan to stay awake for a month?”

Ralph was a small man, about sixty, in a tweed jacket with patched elbows. His appetite for talk was barely whetted by the ten minutes allowed him on air. His teeth were darkly stained with coffee and tobacco. His nicotined hands were the smallest, daintiest hands Eleanor had ever seen on a man.
The two of them were discussing discomfort, how much better everyone used to be at enduring it, but especially the voyageurs during the fur trade and all the storied travellers in the Arctic.

Gwen stood there. They weren’t aware of her. Or pretended they weren’t. After a moment she said, “Some of those travellers weren’t comfortable unless they were
un
comfortable.”

Then they looked over and saw a pair of shocking blue eyes coming straight at them out of a young woman’s white face. She had a large bruise on her throat—the size of a dollar bill torn in half, the purple ten-dollar bill. Dead-white skin (as white, thought Eleanor, as someone’s feet, in shoes all year round, might be). A very bad haircut. And those blue eyes.

“Where did
you
come from?” asked Ralph.

“I just arrived,” she said, and pointed out the window to the soft-shaped, ten-year-old Volvo parked in the street. Attached to it was a very small trailer.

She said, “I was wondering. Who could I talk to about a job?”

They established that she was twenty-four, she’d driven from Georgian Bay in Ontario, more than three thousand miles, camping in her trailer along the way, and if she could find work she would stay for a while. In Toronto she’d been told that anyone as inexperienced in radio as she was should try the hinterlands first.

Ralph’s lips twitched in amusement; he could just picture some bureaucrat with a grand vocabulary. “So you came all this way to be on air.”

“Not on air,” came the hasty answer. “In the background. And I came all this way for other reasons too. I’ve always wanted to see the North.”

It turned out she was intent on becoming a script assistant for radio drama.

“I don’t mean to be harsh,” said Ralph, “but have you been listening to the radio up here? Have you heard any radio dramas? Have you even heard a skit?”

“I think you need them,” she said quietly.

Ah, thought Eleanor. She had trapped a mouse in her trailer a few days ago and this girl was just as subtle in her camouflage: a buff-grey shirt with a pale brown collar, and darker brown pants. No adornment except for the impressive bruise on her throat. An embarrassment, that, or something worse. But her sense of purpose was unmistakable, it cut through the static of her pale, brown personality. Someone else to watch. The girl’s face was flushed now, the underarms of her shirt visibly wet. And Eleanor was reminded of her aunt who had to towel herself dry after she spoke on the telephone, the effort took so much out of her. Yet this same aunt had travelled cities the world over, and she’d done it alone.

This place could be the making of you, Eleanor thought, smiling at Gwen. But then everyone thought the North would be the making of them, as she knew perfectly well. That’s exactly what led to so many disasters.

Eleanor told young Gwen that she wasn’t sure who she should talk to, since their station manager had absconded. Ralph cracked that where he came from it was the weather that was transient: all you had to do was wait five minutes if you
didn’t like it; here, all you had to do was wait five minutes if you didn’t like the people.

Eleanor laughed and went on to say that head office had been talking to Harry Boyd and she guessed they would ask him to step into the breach.

“What if I watched in the meantime,” said Gwen. “I could learn a lot by watching.”

“Have you got a place to stay?”

Gwen indicated her little Boler trailer parked outside, and Eleanor offered her own backyard as a parking place until she found an apartment.