Pig: A Thriller (6 page)

There was one big difference that worried her, though. Unlike herself, Snow had never hated anything or anyone strongly enough to want to keep himself alive.

“The bedroom was our most important room,”
Magda
absently told the waiting room. Everyone smirked, thinking she was talking about sex, not dreams.

It was all
Magda could
do not to do anything, just sit the
re helplessly and watch Snow dying
. What had she done to him? She had meant well. But of all the things that start well and end badly -- relationships, pet ownership, your latest job -- none deteriorated so drastically as a plan begun with good intentions.

Finally finding something to do,
Magda
pulled the
sleep mask down over Snow's eyes
, her knuckles revelling in their arthritis
. "He couldn't sleep without it," she explained when everyone looked at her like she’d just turned down a kilo of sugar. When it came to insomnia, they were both semi-pro. Only Magda -- Magda who was what
Snow had
discovered
he’d come to Russia for
-- could
have told you what was going on behind those flickering lids.

Snow had first noticed it when he was out
exercising a colt
. First ice. Strong to enough to hold an eight-year-old boy. Silently, he genuflected, sodden
woollen
mittens splayed to the sides; face pressed up against the ice, laying on his stomach, staring down where the water was still moving over the gravel. A loon's cry. Solitude. Grace. The cold. The silence of God. A
tadpole
darted, frightened by
the grey shape above.
Had
the tadpole
looked up, it would have seen Canada: children racing and sliding and laughing; boys warming noses around
bonfires built of discarded two-
by
-
fours; wooden sticks slapping against frozen pucks; metal blades rasping through hollow ice; long searches for pucks buried in the snow.

Eight years old and, by then, the Game had already reached out and found him. How, he'd never know. One minute he'd been sitting staring out the frosted window at the foraging elk on the ranch his widowed father ran, the next he'd been sitting in a snow bank lacing up skates dug up out of a forgotten pile in the barn. Sharpening them on a grinder. Following the
creeks
through the dark for miles on end.  No limits. The turns went on for
ages
. Only to come home for hot chocolate and stare up to the infinity that was the stars.

"You know," he'd told Magda the first time he'd told her the story. "That was the night my mind was opened up. It was
the
first time I realized there was more."

On the hospital cot, Snow’s eyes were fluttering in the
typical manner
indicative of R.E.M. sleep. He was dreaming of his beloved Oilers. Edmonton Northlands. When the team still carried such immortals as Gretzky, Kurri, Anderson, Coffey, Messier and Nilsson. Cheap beer night.
Jillian
on her sixth
Big Rock by his side,
magicians
playing impossible tricks with language and time under the dome.

“Will my dreams come true?” Snow had once
asked
Magda while they communed in his room.

“You mean ambitions
,” she corrected
.
“
Dreams
are
true.”

“He’s at peace,” Doctor Bandar reassured her, looking at the still form. “Happy.”

“He was never happy,” Magda snorted
, knowing Snow had never been one that was interested in happy endings, just endings. 
“Only morons are happy.”

“Listen, Skank,”
Pig
said, his voice cold as the click of the lock in a prison cell.  “When I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you. You fat, lesbian slut!”

Since she was one of the few women around camp who wasn’t in Pig’s ‘shed and spread’ category, he had little use for her.
The only thing he would have wanted her for would be if she were willing to open her legs like a chequing account with free unlimited overdraft.

“Is there a problem between you two?” the Doctor asked.

“No
, no problem,” Pig demurred. “
It’s just that I’m tired of this politically correct crap. Look, we both know that all women are are ‘herrings with ideas.’ Lenin’s wife might have pissed in the same toilet as him but that doesn’t mean she knew piss all about Lenini
sm. But no, no problem. Everything’s fine.
M
agda was just being a radical hippie feminist Nazi lesbian quantum physicist, weren’t you Dear?”

“And what were you being?” Magda asked. “Daft?”
She wasn’t impressed by the lies that “normal” people wore like clothes.
             

“I am a veteran of the Afghan campaign,” Pig said.
Successfully running Soviet military camps in the middle of the mujahidin had made Pig qualified to run camps for the Russian oil companies after the fall of Bolshevism.
“I proudly served my country while you were being punished for trying to destroy it.”

“Yeah, yeah, you risked your life fighting the fairies in the war, I know. So what? What else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Being poor? Not having enough to eat the next morning? Have you ever risked belief? Looking foolish? Being ostracized? So you risked your life in Afghanistan. That’s not courage. Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with every day.”

Plump she may
have
be
en
, but Magda had more heart in her than most people had body. So when Pig mocked her for being the aforementioned fat, lesbian slut, the only part she resented was being called fat. She’d earned her heft, paid for it with a good chunk of her soul.

Besides failing to diagnose the colon cancer of the unfortunate Palestinian politician, the Doctor had something else hanging over his head. Shortly after his arrival as the Doctor for the Noyabrsk medical camp, a young petroleum engineer had been brought into the clinic with a touch of food poisoning from the out-of-date supplies Pig habitually purchased for the canteen. A bit of rest and a saline I.V. drip to flush out the poisons and re-hydrate him after t
he bouts of vomiting and diarrh
ea should have done the trick. And it would have, too, if the Doctor hadn’t gotten blind drunk on medicinal alcohol
and shoved the catheter into an artery
instead of a
vein
. One reason veins are preferred over arteries is because the flow will pass through the lungs before passing through the rest of the body. Air bubbles left inside catheter tubes by incompetence can leave the bloodstream through the lungs.
Air bubbles left inside catheters by mistake and going by artery straight to the heart can stop it. Can and did. Turned out the young petroleum engineer was the nephew of the
oblast
governor. ‘Was’ being the operative word. Past tense. As in dead.

No big tragedy. Pig and the Doctor simply conspired to keep the real cause of death secret and “doctor” the death certificate. But Pig never let the Doctor forget. The real cause was kept hanging over Bandar’s head like a derrick over a well if he every threatened to grow a spine and stop doing what Pig told him to.

             
Over the rough decade since Pig’s Camp had been operating under private ownership and administration, roughly two dozen patients had passed away in the Doctor’s clinic. About half of them had been the result of accidents and natural causes. The other half had succumbed mysteriously after being treated for nausea, nosebleeds
, and
loss of hair.
All of these had occurred within the past six months. Throughout that half year, w
hatever the actual cause of death, the Doctor
had dutifully written
down what Pig told him to and signed the death certificates accordingly.

"How many people work here?" Snow had once asked Magda
once she’d broken through Snow’s desire to be left alone in misery
.

What was it about her that made him let her through when so many others failed?
It was the darkness inside
her,
he knew, that he'd recognized. He should have been Russian. Then he could have accepted being locked inside the dungeon of his own head. Wouldn't have had to fight.

She'd considered the question. Carefully. "About half," she finally said, enjoying a sound he didn't make often enough. A laugh.