Pig: A Thriller (26 page)

“God does play dice with the universe, but they’re loaded dice.”

--John Ford

“Not only does God play dice, he hides them.”  -- Stephen Hawking

             
"Who are you to tell God what to do?"  -- Niels Bohr

That night, after Magda left, Snow decided to tackle her book. It had been awhile since he’d last sat down and tried to decipher piles of words pressed between two covers. Reading took a concentration and interest that had been in short supply for a long time. Tonight, he got through the first couple of chapters of
Animal
Farm
before his old ennui took over and he flipped through the channels on his new TV then hooked up his laptop to the Web and connected to the world. He had gotten as far as the part where the windmill gets destroyed in a storm. On the internet, the Edmonton Journal told him the Oilers had lost. Again. What else was new? They hadn’t been a good team since he had been living on the ranch and thought life was still worth living. Next, he checked out Pig’s new web site. As usual, by nine o’clock he could barely keep his eyes open and fell asleep with the book across his chest. Reams of four-hour nights had a way of catching up with you.

Snow woke up from the weight of Scrotum on his chest and a vague sense of confusion over whether four legs or two legs were bad or good. The cat was licking his nose. Its rough sand-papery tongue scraped across the bridge. There was a soft purring hum warming his chest. Wake up slowly and leisurely and your dreams disappear like mist melting in the sunrise. Get jolted awake and it will remain full-formed there for you to decipher.

“Hey, I know,” said Snow to the cat. “Let’s lick our bums.”

He’d had three dreams, three that he could remember anyway, all seeming to be happening at the same time. In the first dream, he was still living and working in the oil camp along with the same people who lived there in real life, but somehow they had all been turned into animals. Pig had turned into a large pig called Napoleon, who ran the place and expertly manipulated all those around him. The Doctor was another pig called Squealer, who went around convincing animals that every single thing Napoleon did was brilliant and trying to convince them how much happier they were now. Kolya was an old donkey called Benjamin, who’d been around so long and suffered so much that he was most content now to just stay out of harm’s way and live his life out as best he could. Arkady and Frantisek were huge draft horses whose mantra was that Napoleon was always right and they could solve every problem simply by working harder. Magda? Magda was a bird able to flit in and out of the oil camp through virtue of her ability to fly and enchant the animals with tales of Sugar Candy Mountain. And him? Snow? Snow was Snow – well, Snowball at least – a pig who Napoleon felt threatened by and would do anything to get out the way. Scrotum was Scrotum, a cat that slept most of the time and ignored everything around him unless it meant a morsel of fish or getting his cheeks scratched. He could talk, but the only thing he was interested in saying was. “Put it in your mouth and eat it!”

In the second dream, a group of physicists stood around arguing while another group of gods stood around a crap table playing dice. The table would appear and disappear, fading into and out of reality, according to which physicist was winning the argument.

Finally, in the third dream, an elephant with a mouth full of mushrooms barged through both other dreams and scattered everyone. That was when he had become aware of Scrotum licking his nose. When Snow looked at him, the cat meowed and rolled over to go to sleep. No putting it in his mouth and eating it or licking his bum tonight. Snow himself was stuck the rest of night watching porn on his new TV:
Monty's Python and the Holey Girl.
For the benefit of who don’t know, it’s a story about King Arthur’s knights on a search for the Holy Grail in Camelot. Snow thought the production values were okay, but the title should have been
Came A Lot
instead
.
Too many shots of the guys, not enough of the girls. Good god! He couldn’t believe this. Now he was becoming a porn expert. Maybe he’d been here too long.

In the course of his work, Doctor Bandar spent a lot of time on administrative matters as well as the medical ones. Besides his duties patching people up in the clinic, he was responsible for stocking and staffing it as well. He also had to keep records of all the patients who went through the clinic and details of their treatment as well. Finally, he was Pig’s chief sycophant and factotum. When the camp boss told the camp doctor to turn his head and cough, he looked like Linda Blair in the exorcist regurgitating pea soup.

So it was no surprise when the Doctor showed up at Document Control office the next day and put a request through for copies of the past year’s medical purchases. The document, duly signed and meticulously formatted was made in the name of the Doctor’s hiring organization. Kolya smiled and politely returned the request form, stating all forms had to be signed by the person submitting the request for document release. Either the Doctor could make the request in his own name, or the director of his medical clinic would have to come in personally and make the requisition request.

The Doctor thanked him and suddenly remembered Frantisek back in the clinic needed immediate care.

Frantisek Musil had been a well logger at the Noyabrsk oil operations since well before the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event about which he didn’t give the proverbial flying fornication about. The son of Czechoslovak parents, he was now a naturalized Russian and didn’t know nor much care if his heritage came from the current Czech or Slovak components of the two newly independent nations or whether the New Russia was capitalist, communist or pugilist. As long as his job kept him handsomely paid, he was content to be ignorant of anything that didn’t involve hydrocarbons, pipelines or ethanol. Women and football were his next level of concerns. His health never had been. He’d always been as strong as a horse. His nickname was the “missile,” because he could set up and interpret oil borehole loggings faster than anyone else on site, a fact made all the more important now that they were short staffed. Frantisek wasn’t the first one working in Noyabrsk to suddenly come down ill.

During oil well loggings, a tool is lowered on the end of a wireline into a wellhole to measure the properties of a rock formation. As the toolstring travels along the wellbore, it gathers information about the surrounding formations. A typical log will have information about the density, porosity, permeability, lithology, hydrocarbon presence, and water saturation. Cesium
137 is the main chemical used in oil well logging.

It hadn’t felt like much to start: some coughing and a lot of phlegm, chest pain, shortness of breathy, red and irritated eyes, sensitive skin, and an iffy tummy. All things he put down to getting older, working too hard or drinking too much. Soon, however, the phlegm became spotted red with blood and he was short of breath and felt a burning sensation when he exerted himself. That was when he had ended up in Doctor Bandar’s clinic. Prussian Blue, the Doctor had him on a course of. That and a number of other treatments: antibiotics, intestinal purges, a bland diet, teetotalling. All temporary, the Doctor had reassured him. He’d soon be up and drinking and whoring and drilling like his old self.

The memorial service for Frantisek Musil took place in the main Camp Auditorium. Everyone not on shift was there, as well as a large portion of the civilian population of Noyabrsk. That’s what they called anyone who didn’t work for the oil company: “civilians.” Magda was there, along with several of her “employees,” who’d been frequent service providers to poor Frantisek. He’d expired overnight in the Clinic, having choked to death on his own blood in his lungs. Kolya and Snow had been given leave to shut down Document Control for a few hours to attend. The eulogy was delivered by Porfiry Makahonic, or Pig as everyone there knew him. Everyone agreed it was a rousing success. Not a dry eye was left after Pig extolled the many (until now, unknown) virtues of Frantisek the Well Logger, known as “Musil the Missile” to all and one. His contributions to the orphanage, work with the widows’ organization and volunteer work with the Veterans’ Club were as unknown to all present as Pig’s real name. They would even been have unknown to the Missile himself had he been able to hear them. In honour of  The Missile’s uncompromising charity, the company, Pig announced, was awarding a double pension to his heirs (he had none, but no one there knew that either) and a scholarship to the technical institute in Frantisek’s name. One thing you could never accuse Pig of was not knowing how to put the “fun” in “funeral.”