Pig: A Thriller (16 page)

             
“Pig,” Kolya sneered. His opinion of the Camp Boss was clear in the single syllable. Kolya was of the opinion that anyone who could rise to the position of wealth and power Pig had attained in the new Russia without shaking hands with at least three kinds of devil knew nothing about the devil and probably even less about Russia.

             
“What did he want?”

             
“Documents,” shrugged Kolya. “What else?”

             
“Did you give them to him?”

             
“Told him he had to follow procedure just like everyone else.”

Of course he would have. For Kolya, the rules were sacrosanct. The two of them spent the rest of their shift moving papers around, without saying so much as a word to the other, Pig’s visit, for the moment, forgotten. After work, Snow went back to the Mess Hall, nodded to the same two nameless roughnecks and pushed some food around his plate again uneaten. He had three or four hours to kill before he could drift off to dreamless sleep. He hoped Pig had made the vodka delivery.

On the way back to his porta-cabin, it was already dark, despite only being five p.m. Briefly, he paused to look up at the sky and saw the same stars he would see back home. The crisp, dry cold made images remarkably clear. He inhaled deeply, like a camper savouring the pine-scented air, and gagged on hydrocarbons. His gaze drifted up to the sky: Ursa Major. The pollution of the oil processing plant blotted out the fainter stars, but he could recognize brighter ones like the Big Bear. From his earlier life and reading the Bible with his mother, he knew Ursa Major had been mentioned as far back as the book of Job. People as far back as the Mesopotamians had recorded its presence. Different though his new life in Russia might be, the constellations were the same. It was still the North.

A Russian folk tale said that Polaris (the North Star) was really a maddened dog tied by an iron chain to the Little Bear, and that if the chain ever broke it would be end of the world. Snow could relate. Breaking his own chains would feel like the end of his world.

Snow had gotten as far as the major junior hockey level back home in Canada, the highest you can get before turning adult and either making a career out of hockey professionally or giving up and getting real work. He’d even been drafted by a pro team in his teens. He’d never make it farther, but he had had one brief shining moment along the way. He had been living in Northern B.C then -- you played in whatever place drafted you, you didn’t get to pick --  keeping his relationship with Jillian alive by letter and phone, when the call came from Calgary to join the big team while a regular was out with a bad groin. The catch was he had to be there in fourteen hours; thirteen hundred kilometres in fourteen hours. Plane service being what it was, flights were limited to once a week and that was three days off. Driving his coach's old pick-up non-stop through the night, he stopped only for gas and food he could eat in the cab on the way.

When he pulled into Jasper, the halfway point, he had a decision to make. The road through the mountains could cut three hours off the ride. On the other hand, it was snowing and driving along a treacherous seven-percent mountain grade in the dark with no rest or sleep might mean he'd never make it at all. There wasn't really a choice. He did what any Canadian kid who'd give his left nut to make it in the big leagues would. He took the shortcut.

The road was worse than he thought, and he was sweating in the cold as he drove, the road reduced to a thin icicle banked on the sides by seven-foot walls of snow the bulldozers had cleared off the road. He didn't dare stop, knowing there was no way he'd work up enough traction on the ice to get going again. Besides, the cleared track was so narrow any oncoming traffic would plow right into him. He need not have worried, no one else was fool enough to try and make it over the pass in that weather at night. He was completely and utterly alone.

He drove that way for hours, barely coaxing the old pick-up beyond a stately fifty kilometres an hour against the unrelenting upward slope, until the road widened along a flat stretch and he felt confident enough to pull over and take care of the pressing business of his bladder. He eased the cab door open and was amazed: the sky was on fire, constellations he'd never heard of before playing hide-and-seek with the shimmering mauve and green quicksilver blankets of ions dancing around the Big Bear in the infinite night sky.

Living in the North you picked up a thing or two, and he knew that the Inuit believed if you whistled the Aurora would come down to you. Snow tried, blowing so long his fingers froze in the saliva. But no matter how long he blew, they stayed just out of reach. Only after his feet became so numb he feared they wouldn't be able to operate the clutch did he climb back into the truck. After that, he made good enough time to be in Calgary for the pre-game meal. Whether it was the Northern Lights or not, he'd played the best game of his life. He was sent back to the juniors when the regular recovered, but he'd made enough of an impression to get a contract for the  next season with the big team. Then came the fucking poplar tree and he stopped thinking about hockey altogether. He’d seen where activities that involved taking your pants off had taken him on the ridge above the Castle River and had had quite enough, thank you.

             
“How heavy the days are. There is not a fire that can warm me, not a sun to laugh with me. Everything base. Everything cold and merciless. And even the beloved clear stars look desolately down.”

             
             
             
             
             
             
             
-- Herman Hesse,
Steppenwolf

Snow checked the freezer in his porta-cabin. No vodka delivery yet. That was another reason to leave the door unlocked. He didn’t have to be there to take possession. Grumpy over the lack of anything alcoholic to drink, he settled into a hollow in the lumpy cot and flipped the TV on. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Hmm, some porn.
Tits A Wonderful Life.
Huge pneumatic silicon tits that wouldn’t have been interesting even if Big Wilf were still interested in that sort of thing. It was early, still only seven-ish, but he was exhausted. Falling asleep was never the problem these days, staying asleep was. Inevitably, come three or four in the morning he’d be wide awake, thoughts racing like hornets around a hive attacked by a barn cat.

             
Snow used the remote to turn the TV off and noticed the case of Coffee Crisps from under his bed was gone. In its place was a note from Magda telling him she’d taken it and if he wanted it back he’d have to come get it. Not giving a shit, Snow rolled over and went to sleep…only to come wide awake with a start at two thirty in the morning from the light creeping into the room and thinking he’d gone to sleep with the light on only to realize it was the glare from the flares in the gas fields. For a moment there, he had thought his head might have been glowing in the dark. He spent the rest of the time until morning staring at the flares in the distance.

             
So he was awake when the phone rang, shattering the dark stillness. He picked it up on the first ring.

             
“‘The way is not in the sky,’” the disembodied voice said. “’The way is in the heart.’”

             
Then, it hung up.

             
At three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

             
             
             
             
             
-- F. Scott Fitgerald,
The Crack-Up

The next day, when he came back from work, his bedside clock was gone and the vodka supply was still empty. If Magda thought a missing clock was going to get him riled up – get him up at all -- she was wrong.

             
The third day, nothing new was missing. Even better, there had been a vodka delivery. Snow decided that he’d worry about Magda and her thefts tomorrow. In his state of mind, tomorrow could be considered long-range thinking.

On the fourth day, the TV was missing and replaced with a note from Pig saying Snow was expected to pay for it. This time, Snow was seriously pissed. At this rate, he wouldn’t  even have a bed to not sleep on. Digging the note from three days ago out of garbage, he plugged the phone in and dialled the number.

“Where’s my fucking TV?” he demanded when Magda answered.

“If you really want it, come get it.”

“No,” Snow said. “You took it. You bring it here.”

Magda hung up.

Snow phoned back immediately. “Bring me my fucking TV,” he demanded.

“No,” Magda chuckled. “I will never set foot in the place you live again. Strike that. A few toiletries, some detritus of food, a morose television, no pictures, books, music, games or laughter? What you’re doing there can’t be called living at all. I told you. You want it, come get it.” She hung up again.

Snow tried to wait it out, but was so angry he finally got up and phoned again. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll come get it. Where do you live? The complex?” he asked, referring to the massive housing project typical of Russia that dominated Noyabrsk. People don’t boast they’re from Noyabrsk.  “How do I get there?”

“No, not the complex, the simple.”

“Huh?”

“Look, when you get into town, just ask the first person you see where the whore lives.”

             
The evening was very cold, but not unpleasantly so. A light snow was falling. If this were Ireland and it were forty degrees warmer, they’d call it a “soft” day. But nothing was soft here in Noyabrsk.  As usual, Snow walked. The exercise did him good. So did looking at the stars in the sky. For the past umpteen years, he had kept a barbed-wire fence around his soul, stuck like a mouse on a wheel, not letting any pleasure, anger or other threatening feelings to come into the cycle at any point, just an inner scratching inside his head that threatened worse was surely yet to come. The walk and the stars had calmed him down somewhat, eased the anger that was threatening to overload his system. The mouse wheel was back to manageable proportions.

At Magda’s place, he knocked. She was right. It had been easy to find. Everyone knew where it was. The flat was broad and squat like her, a bright coat of paint unable to conceal the truth that it had seen better days underneath. If there were truth-in-labelling laws in Russia, this part of town would be called shit. She answered the door almost immediately, Coffee Crisp in hand, his TV blaring in background.

Unbidden, the anger rose in him like a shark to chum: they would fight this one for hours before landing it, weighing and photographing it on the dock, talking about it over beers, mounting it for display later over the bar. His fingers curled into a fist and just before he struck her, Magda looked at him with her cool eyes and asked him how he felt.