Late Nights on Air (21 page)

Lorna Dargabble was on her way to the microphone. Harry glanced back at Dido. She was standing in front of Eddy, leaning against him. His hands were on her shoulders. The two of them shone with a powerful, self-righteous glow, it seemed to Harry, who considered self-righteousness a sin in itself, not that the thought made him feel any better. Lorna Dargabble was wishing everybody would stop romanticizing the past. She was an old woman, she was saying, and she’d seen what men do to women late at night and it didn’t matter if they were white or native, or if it was ten years ago or today. There’s a lot of ugliness in the North and a lot of abuse. We need kindness, she was saying, jobs and kindness. But she was losing her train of thought, and Harry noticed Eddy whispering in Dido’s ear and Dido smiling and nodding. They seemed
to be amused by the old woman. Not only self-righteous, he thought, but cruel. Then he was called back to Lorna, her voice suddenly clear as a bell. “I heard on the radio this man telling you the pipeline companies will rape the land. Well, this man ought to know. I mean to say, he’s been up on rape charges more than once. There’s a lot of talk about the terrible degradation the pipeline will bring. Oh, yes. And I’m worried too. But don’t believe everything you hear, that’s all I’m saying.”

Lorna’s short testimony was greeted by a shuffling of feet, a certain embarrassment. Berger, unfailingly polite, thanked her. At every one of these hearings the atmosphere was serious, unhurried; people wanted to express themselves. Frequently, someone would say, as a young woman was saying now, “I didn’t intend to speak tonight, I just intended to listen. However, after listening to the last person, I felt I had to speak. I think it’s time we believed in the native people. This is their land.” A Dene fellow went to the microphone after that. “Like myself,” he said, “I’m a young man. I’m only twenty-three years old and I’m thinking about my kids.” Harry would see this man again on a cold winter’s day under circumstances so different he wouldn’t recognize him at first. “Today I was parking my truck downtown. Yes, I parked my truck because I was going to be gone about half an hour, but I was gone forty-five minutes. When I got back to my truck I got a ticket and it was going to cost me three dollars. I was thinking, well, this is Dene land. They should at least ask us before they do their regulations. At least they should ask the chiefs. They should say, what do you think?” There was a murmur of sympathy from the audience, some nodded their heads. “Before the white
people came to Yellowknife, kids used to be learning lessons from their parents. Our kids don’t listen now and even the dogs, we don’t have any good dogs now. All the white people came and brought their small dogs around, they’re all mixed up now. Everything they’re spoiling. They spoiled the water too. They spoiled the land.” The hall was quiet now. “I just hope the government listens to us,” he said, and pushed back his chair. “So, this is all I wanted to say.”

Harry ought not to have stood up. He knew better. But he cradled his glasses in his left hand and went to the microphone. He’d expected somebody else to take issue with Eddy. Had they been uptown in the Elk’s Hall, rather than here in Old Town, there would have been any number of businessmen and local politicians ready and eager to defend the pipeline. He had no intention of being pro-pipeline, but he felt he had to speak. “Judge Berger, I’m the white boss referred to earlier. I’m the manager of a radio station soon to be dwarfed by a television station. So as bosses go, I’m pretty small potatoes.” He heard the door of the hall bang shut and wondered if that was Dido and Eddy leaving. “This isn’t going to make me popular with my own bosses, but I feel I have to say it. I’m speaking for myself as a resident of the North, you understand. Here we have an inquiry about the effects of the pipeline, what you, sir, in your opening remarks called the most expensive project ever undertaken by private enterprise anywhere in the world. But Judge, let’s say you’re able to recommend ways of keeping the pipeline far away from the communities. Let’s say you’re able to do that,” Harry said. “Then it could be argued that its impact will do less harm in the long run than television beamed in from the south. I don’t mean to trivialize the
pipeline. My real point is that some things we can’t escape, television’s one of them, the pipeline’s probably another. But we can slow them down and we don’t have to resort to violence to do it. An example. Last March the settlement of Igloolik rejected television in a referendum. They chose instead to have a radio station they control. In my view the best thing your inquiry is doing is waking everybody up so they’re on guard against being rushed and pushed and bullied into things. For the record, I don’t want the pipeline, and I don’t want it because the native people don’t want it. After all, we white people from the south are in the minority up here. We should stop trying to get our own way all the time.” Harry thanked the judge, and returned to the back of the hall, hoping for what? Not Dido’s semi-smile, her look of cool appraisal, if that’s what it was. That’s certainly what it felt like. Teresa touched his arm when he sat down. “Thank you, Harry.”

Not long afterwards, as Harry was leaving to go home, a reporter from the local newspaper stopped him at the door, wanting to be sure he had his name and position right. Once he was home, Harry made a pot of coffee, and then he went for a long walk and came upon Gwen, in her fur coat, staring up at the northern lights.

“Aurora Borealis,” he said. “Electrically charged particles in the solar wind collide with molecules in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and the collision gives off light.”

“You should be in bed,” said Gwen.

“The green is caused by oxygen and the violet by nitrogen.”

They continued to stare at the colours in the sky, Harry recalling the moment last summer when Gwen had been
decorated head and shoulders in blue damselflies. Here she was again, glad to be out in the elements. It made him feel better just to see her.

“I did something I shouldn’t have tonight,” he said.

“What was that?”

“I took a political position. I said where I stood.”

“That’s commendable.”

“Not for the manager of a public radio station. We’re supposed to be objective, not take sides, especially in a political climate as charged as this one.”

It became known as the Harry Boyd incident, and it caused him more grief with his own newsroom than with head office. Head office merely rapped his knuckles and warned him not to do anything like it again. But Thwaite and Tupper were furious with him for making their own lives more difficult. Here they were trying to present themselves as unbiased, which they were, and their station manager had to run off at the mouth at a public meeting. They sent a letter of complaint to the head of the Northern Service in Ottawa. There would be a later letter, too, signed by others.

ONE DAY IN EARLY NOVEMBER
, Dido came to work in dark glasses. That evening Gwen found her staring out the window of the empty office, lost in thought. She’d pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head, and Gwen saw the bruised and puffy left eye.

Between the two women there sprang up a momentary, unbridgeable silence. Dido’s cool glance. Gwen’s stock stillness. Dido hadn’t turned on the overhead light. Except for one desk lamp, the room was dark. Fleetingly, Gwen remembered sitting in the shade of a plum tree after her mother’s funeral. A neighbour, attending to his garden on the other side of the fence, scraped a trowel against a clay pot, and the earthy sound cut through all her troubles and made her aware of the grass and plums and birds.

“Dido?”

“I’m right here.”

Gwen hesitated. Then she took a step forward. “We don’t talk much any more. Something went wrong. I don’t know when it all began.”

Dido smiled a little. She was wearing a close-fitting leather jacket over a black top. Her hands were expressive and lean and white as she took her dark glasses off her head and folded them
and set them on the desk in front of her. “I knew we’d end up talking about this.”

“And you don’t want to.” Gwen had settled gingerly on a chair about eight feet away. There was the smell of old coffee. A dark purple iris on the calendar on the wall.

Dido smiled again. “You’re hot and cold.”

Gwen absorbed this, the surprise of it, the weight of it. “I don’t think so,” she said, puzzled. No one had ever said such a thing to her before. If anyone was hot and cold, it was Dido herself.

“I used to go home at night and slam the table and yell your name, I’d be so mad at you.”

Gwen stared at her in amazement. “But what for?”

“For some slight during the day. I’d say something and you’d answer something back as if to say I was stupid.”

“No.” Gwen was shaking her head. She felt like a child caught doing wrong, cold and sick in her stomach.

“Yes. That’s exactly what you do. You say by a look, or just your tone of voice, that the idea someone’s talking about is ignorant. You can be so contemptuous.”

“Dido, I don’t feel
any
contempt for you. If I seem to, I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure?”

Gwen sat there, dumbfounded. She scanned back through the past, trying to resurrect incidents, but she and Dido, working their separate shifts, hadn’t seen each other much at all. She wanted to say, Are
you
sure you’ve got the right person?

She said, “I get nervous. I know that puts me in a bad mood. Usually I’m so uncertain about what I’m doing.” She stopped. Then deliberately she quoted Dido back to herself.
“Some people know exactly how good they are. Some of us aren’t like that at all.”

But Dido didn’t appear to catch the reference. “Well, you shouldn’t make
me
suffer for it. I expect to be treated differently by you.”

Gwen sat back in her chair. Dido was being unreasonable. She wanted to be treated with kid gloves. A queen. But she was a slipping queen. There she was with a black eye.

“Does it hurt?” Gwen asked. “How did it happen?”

Dido gave her a long look. “I don’t feel I can trust you.” She delivered her deadly verdict in an even voice. “Not with anything really important. You’re too unpredictable.”

“You can predict what I’m going to talk about,” Gwen said carefully. “You knew we’d end up talking about this.”

That’s when Dido’s face softened somewhat and she backed off. “I suppose you’re right.” She reached over and turned on another lamp.

In the additional light, Gwen saw how vulnerable she really looked. It was more than the black eye, it was her skin, which looked paper-thin instead of creamy, and the way she rubbed her thumb with the fingertips of the same hand, repeatedly, but seemed unaware she was doing it. The way she dug her teeth into her lower lip, leaving tooth marks.

For a while they talked about other things, but not about anything really important: not about Dido’s black eye, for instance. What they talked about was work. Gwen had taken it upon herself to dramatize a series of northern legends about Raven, trickster and creator of the world, and she asked Dido to be the narrator, something she’d been meaning to ask for days. “That is, if you don’t mind working with me.”

“I don’t mind,” Dido replied. “If you treat me with respect.”

“Dido, everyone respects you. Don’t you know that?”

Although Dido didn’t respond, Gwen could see by the way she swept her hair off her face—an old and confident gesture—that she was pleased, and Gwen felt almost forgiven.

Before Dido left for the night—leaving the station in Gwen’s hands—she hugged her, then stood back and surveyed her wary, appeasing face. Then leaned forward and kissed her, for the second time, on the mouth.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said in response to the alarm in Gwen’s eyes. “I won’t rape you.”

In fairy tales there is the fairy who is not invited, the child who is not protected, the princess who is wooed by the wrong prince. These shocking moments are lifted whole into the light, drawn up out of a deep well, and there they hang, glistening and floundering, all exposed.

The first time Eddy and Dido got stoned together, Dido learned what
the body electric
meant: they were their own northern lights, murmured Eddy, who kept up an intoxicating riff of suggestive, explicit words as he made love to her slowly and expertly. Dido had walked away incredulous, then gone back for more. Eddy had a basement apartment on a street two blocks south of the radio station. His furnishings were meagre and provided by the landlord, but he kept it very clean. Once the weather turned cold, he’d stopped using his space in the warehouse in Old Town and moved all his transmitters and
radio parts and cameras into the spare bedroom. He took photographs of Dido and developed them in the bathroom until a photographer at the local newspaper let him use their darkroom instead. He showed Dido his shots of her and pinned several to the wall. She didn’t know about the other photographs he was taking, and when she did find out—and viewed them—she made the same excuses, offered the same rationale that Eddy would.

His place had no curtains and the light that came across their bed was like moonlight from outer space. Their bodies glimmered against the sheets. Then came the early morning when she wanted to leave and he wouldn’t let her. He pinned her less than playfully to the bed. The next time he got rough with her, she got rough back, and that aroused her in a way that shook and sickened and excited her.