Late Nights on Air (11 page)

That night he was lying on his bed thinking about the station—his station—and radio people he’d known. Quarrelsome as sparrows guarding their territory, but what issued from them was song, birdsong being proprietary and exclusive. What were people imagining as they listened to radio? How friendly everyone was. How well they must get along, how intimate they must be. Not knowing how they fought to get air time, resisted anything new, stewed in their own jealousy and ill will.

These were Harry’s jaded thoughts. He knew he was too friendly with some of his staff, too cantankerous with the rest; it came from being an announcer himself, and from not having his heart in management—programming, yes, but not management. For his own sake, and the station’s, he should court the newsmen, bolster them, encourage them, make them feel valued. His radio was on, a low-level irritation at the moment with its yap yap yap of excessive information and mediocre music coming from Toronto. Ella lay on the floor beside him, awake, alert, always ready for a walk. He reached over and rubbed her ears and an idea came to him for a program of old songs, old tales, old remedies, old places. He heard the wind and the familiar thudding sounds of ravens on the roof, and stroked his dog’s thick fur. His grandfather had been a furrier. Edgar Farnham, his mother’s father, a man with wide-set eyes,
floppy ears, floppy moustache, a man who liked to talk but only in a quiet room. As a small boy, Harry loved going into his shop in Winnipeg, loved all the fluff on the floor, the pigeon feathers in the windows, the girlie calendars on the walls, the winking men bent over their sewing machines. In the back office, he learned some bits of fur terminology: a thin pelt that crackles is called
a paper
, a thick pelt
a heavy
. He learned that you can clean fur by tumbling it with sawdust inside a drum; that mink is much cleaner and easier to work with than fox or coyote—shake a coyote pelt and you get clouds of dust. On his fifth birthday, his grandfather gave him a small swatch of mink and it became precious. Without it rubbing back and forth under his nose he couldn’t fall asleep.

He was seven when they left Winnipeg. His father took over the Presbyterian parish in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and Harry drifted naturally into a friendship with a boy who made him think of his grandfather. The two things got mixed sentimentally in his mind: leaving his grandfather, then finding Mark Green, whose family had the only fur store in town.

Not surprising that the first he saw of his wife was her hair. Several long black hairs on the back of a chair. He’d picked them off distractedly, thinking they looked oriental, but they turned out to belong to the head of a dark and temperamental Scot.

After she left him, he opened a book one day and noticed a long pencil mark down the page. But it was one of Evelyn’s long, dark hairs.

Later that night Harry had the idea of giving a party as a way of seeing more of Dido. He would invite everyone at work and then she would come too. He chose a Saturday in mid-July and spread the word around the station. However, news got bruited about the Strange Range that there was a party on Latham Island at the white house with the red canoe out front, and all sorts of people Harry had never seen before turned up.

Jim Murphy got particularly drunk and had to utter each word very carefully. He kept saying, “You’re missing the whole point. Everything you do ought to be bilingual. Every program ought to be bilingual.” And Eleanor listened, surprised he’d even have thought about it, and agreeing with him, though why he was telling her rather than Harry was a mystery.

She turned with relief to Ralph, who asked if the name Agnes Deans Cameron meant anything to her. It didn’t mean a thing, so Ralph told her about the fascinating schoolmarm from Victoria who wrote a book about her travels to the Arctic in 1908. She visited Hudson’s Bay trading posts along her route and read their logs, he said, and discovered in the process an account of the two starving Indian women who attacked and killed a pair of mail carriers on the Mackenzie River, partially devoured them, then made the leftovers into pemmican. Ralph said, “The Hudson’s Bay factor asked the women what the flesh tasted like and they replied that ‘one of the men was very good but the little red Scotchman tasted of tobacco.’” And he roared with laughter.

For his part, Harry watched Dido. He took heart when she needled Eddy about being a teetotaller. Eddy, without rising to the bait, filled her glass whenever she held it out: his wrists narrower than hers, more wiry. They were never more than a
few feet apart—if Dido moved away, Eddy was soon at her side, and if Eddy moved away, it was the same.

But there came a moment when Eddy set the wine bottle on the coffee table, and the hard, neat sound of glass on wood marked a shift in the party. In his abrupt, inscrutable way, Eddy stood up to leave, and Harry had all his suspicions confirmed. Between Dido and Eddy things were more advanced than he’d wanted to believe, more advanced, more aggressive, more potent.

He growled, “Eddy,” halting him in his progress to the door. “How did you end up in Yellowknife, anyway?”

Eddy stayed where he was standing. The music had stopped and the noise of the party had fallen off for a moment. “It’s a long story, Harry.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

With mild contempt, “Is that right?”

A pause, and then Eddy deigned to give a cold sober account of his movements. About a year ago, he said, leaning against the wall, he was driving around one day, aimless and bored, and he came to a fork in the road. He was in Montana at the time. The sign had two arrows, one pointed north, the other south. He could have gone either way. But the singer on the car radio was Neil Young, so he turned north, and then he decided he might as well follow the road until it ran out, which it finally did on the north shore of Great Slave Lake.

“Are you always so impulsive?” asked Dido, who by now had joined them.

“Try decisive,” Eddy replied.

“So what was Neil Young singing?” she persisted with a faint smile.

Harry, through the pain in his heart, saw exactly what he was up against. Eddy had no sense of humour, and Dido, serious Dido, didn’t care. European to the core, she’d fallen for the lean, sardonic, tight-lipped cowboy in jeans.

Eddy flipped through Harry’s records—then dropped the needle directly onto the first note of “Helpless.”

After that Dido stopped giving Eddy a hard time, she yielded her rights to tormenting him. And Harry, watching the play of feeling on her face, understood the power of a song to advance a man in a woman’s heart. Songs, he thought, were the seven-league boots of romance.

Dido didn’t leave with Eddy, though. She stayed, and the party went in another direction. Rapidly downhill. Harry would stand in the bathroom doorway an hour later, and in a state of marvelling despair watch while one person threw up in the bathroom sink, a second put his head in the toilet, and a third vomited into the bathtub. Not long after that, all of the afflicted had passed out on his living-room floor.

Rocking in his rocking chair, Harry presided over the aftermath of his own poor judgment, since he’d been the one to open the bottle of tequila. Gwen was sound asleep on the sofa. Two strangers were sleeping next to her on the floor. Eleanor had nodded off in a chair, waiting for Dido. And Dido sat on the floor in the lotus position, awake, alert, wired.

Then began the conversation that Harry would return to whenever he tried to understand Dido and what happened to her. Had he only said something different, had he issued the right sort of warning, had he offered her some other view of herself—who knows, he might have rescued her in time. It was
three o’clock in the morning and the rising sun began to touch everything in the room, rosy light on ashtrays, bottles, glasses, bodies. Dido was asking him what he thought of Eddy, what he knew about him. At the time Harry was so busy following the passage of light across her skin, and so disinclined to ponder anything or anybody else, that he simply said he barely knew the man. Dido pressed him, she asked if he thought Eddy was good at what he did. Then he had to admit that he was, that Andrew McNab considered him the best radio technician he’d ever had. A look of pleasure lit up and relaxed her face. That look—of basking in what she’d wanted to hear, perhaps without even knowing she’d wanted to hear it—made Harry realize that Dido was talking herself into something, talking herself into being serious about Eddy. So he said acidly that Eddy was obviously a reformed boozer given the way he turned down anything stronger than Pepsi. She smiled. “Did you know he served in Vietnam?” He nodded. He did know.

Silence. Till Harry hoisted himself to his feet, asking what she wanted to listen to, and Dido said he’d done well in choosing the previous record, she’d be curious to see what he chose next.

Gwen sat up with a groan at that point and rubbed her eyes. Eleanor and the strangers on the floor slept on.

“This is the last record for tonight,” Harry said, searching for the bagpipe music he favoured whenever he wanted to blast everybody out of his house.

“He won’t tell us what it is,” Dido said to Gwen. “He likes to hold his chest to his cards. Do I say it correctly? Harry?” He looked over at her. “Do I say it correctly?”

She was so beautiful. Even at this hour she looked elegant, perfect. She was wearing a yellow sweater and he felt old.

“I’ve got to go home.” Gwen was on her feet, swaying.

“You’re white as a sheet,” Dido cried, and she followed Gwen to the door. “Wait. Your shoelace is undone.”

Then Gwen sat on a chair while Dido, quite tenderly, as if Gwen were a child, tied her shoe.

OVER THE SUMMER AIR
came footsteps in the snow. Gwen had learned from Jim Murphy the trick of kneading cornstarch in a plastic bag to duplicate the sound. Also, how to make ocean waves by sloshing the contents of a hot-water bottle back and forth. Generally, she was alone at the station as she aired her playful sound effects, but sometimes Eddy haunted the record library until she signed off at one in the morning. He had a key to the station, too, and a few times she had gone home, leaving him to lock up.

“The mistakes don’t matter,” he informed her one night after she stumbled over a station
ID
and apologized on air. “It’s the recovery that counts.”

If she had a nickel for every one of his smiles, she’d have ten cents. She nodded sheepishly, preferring Harry’s way of phrasing the same point.
I learned that a mistake is just something you go on from
. Harry’s advice gave her a route to follow, a path forward. Somehow Eddy managed to exchange one form of stress for another.

He leaned against the doorway, a pocket Faulkner under his arm, a pen in his hand. Frequently, he brought her records, slipping them in and out of their covers as he introduced her to
Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, John Fahey, Sarah Vaughan. With Eddy she always felt even younger than she was. Not
disliked
, revising what she’d said to Ralph, not held in contempt, that was too strong. Just examined in passing and discarded. Sometimes Eddy answered her questions, sometimes he didn’t.

“Harry’s in love with Dido too,” she said bravely, curious to see his reaction.

“Harry’s not good enough for her.”

“Are you?”

He had a way of working the clip on his pen with his thumbnail, making a series of aggressive click click clicks. “Why don’t you ask if she’s good enough for me?”

Something in his manner reminded her of her brother, whom it was never wise to cross. Her brother didn’t rest until he got his own way; then, having won, he’d sweeten. Countless, countless, countless times, she’d been sucked in by his forceful personality, his general indifference to her, his occasional delight in her, and then, how did it happen? It was harder to breathe, because she was breathing his air.

“So what’s it like to have a third-rate boss?” Eddy asked her, still in the doorway.

“Second-rate,” she bristled, then had to laugh since her defence was hardly a ringing endorsement.

“No. Third-rate.” Not giving an inch to Harry or to humour.

Then he reached over and began to stroke the back of her neck. “Relax,” he ordered, moving directly behind her and massaging with both hands.
“Relax.”
His fingers dug into her neck, hurting her.

She let herself be experimented upon. Or so it felt to her.

“I’ve got a great record for you,” he said.

“What.”

“It’s perfect for your show.”

“Are you going to tell me. Or am I supposed to guess.”

“Promise you’ll play it.”

The record turned out to be
Kind of Blue
by Miles Davis, cool melodic jazz forever ruined by the feel of Eddy’s fingers pressing into her neck.

A few days later Gwen went to the town dump near the airport to record the extensive vocabulary of the local ravens, their rasping croaks and rattles and gargles and gulps, their metallic
toks
and
awks
and
ku-uk-kuks
and
quorks
. She discovered in the process how to avoid the wind noises that wrecked the clear sounds she was after. An old umbrella lay on a heap of shoes. She held it open in front of her microphone and it worked like a charm, defeating the wind without blocking the weird and wonderful squawks, or the strong wing-beats overhead.

Eddy appeared while she was there and she asked him what he was looking for, since he didn’t seem to have anything he was getting rid of. He didn’t bother to answer. She took another tack. “Do you mind?” she asked, and she turned on her tape recorder and picked up the sound of their footsteps as they crossed the crunchy ground. Then she directed her microphone towards his mouth. “What brings you to the dump?” she asked. He frowned, but told her he was looking for
bicycle spokes. Then he went on. He told her you could furnish a house with what got thrown into this dump. He’d found window frames and unbroken panes of glass, perfectly good doors and shelves and kitchen cupboards. He’d found radios and television sets and cameras—an excellent camera that he’d fixed in an hour.