Late Nights on Air Read Free

Netherlands. She told him her mother sewed warm winterpants for her from old army uniforms and she had to wear pyjamas underneath, otherwise the khaki chafed her thighs and made them bleed. At the look on his face, she smiled and touched his arm. It wasn’t so bad, she said. In a way, I didn’t mind. And you won’t believe how much I miss what I ate then, chocolate sprinkles on bread, we put the butter on top of the sprinkles to keep them in place, and speculaas—you know? the Dutch windmill cookie?—between two slices of buttered bread. I bicycled to school and took that for my lunch. Her voice had a buoyant, velvety sound. Sensual, but not so sensual it lost energy or authority. Had her father been her teacher? he wanted to know. Not officially, she said, and she grew pensive again. Her father had died quite recently, in March, still listening to the BBC. At the time of his death she’d been here, substitute teaching Math and French at the local high school, a job that merely met her need to be as far away as possible from her romantic entanglements. After her father’s death she felt impelled to rethink her life. In a first step, she came to the station offering to volunteer. “And the rest is history,” said Harry.
    He couldn’t imagine this beautiful woman, whose manner he could only describe as regal, lasting very long in a town like Yellowknife. And when he asked about her intentions, she said she had no idea whether she’d even stay in Canada. “Canada” she pronounced with a certain contempt. Canadians were spoiled, she said. Look at the size and weight of their over-crammed garbage cans, the number and newness of their cars, the houses standing unoccupied, the closets bursting with clothes, the daily showers. She didn’t go on, but she could have. Her ex-husband’s family had used water as if there wereno tomorrow, but with her sense of economy and quality—in the Netherlands even a tea towel was made to last for decades—with her sense of history, tragedy, and time, she knew better than these dishwashing guzzlers, these showering fools, these lawn-lovers and land-wasters. Yellowknife, however, was different. Here, she felt that she’d stepped backwards into small-town life, especially in the unplanned old part of town where there was outdoor plumbing and the streets were unpaved and had names like Ragged Ass Road. Such a curious mixture, the city was, of brand-new and raw-old, of government buildings and beer parlours and bush planes and little shack-like houses close to the water, which seemed to lie in all directions, as did the vast wilderness. The place was full of opportunities, she said, especially if you were white and even if you were a woman.
    Harry drew a map of Yellowknife for Dido, marking the location of his house on Latham Island at the far end of Old Town, not with an X but with a • like a beauty mark. And was it deliberate or unconscious, she wondered, that his rendition of the island (separated from the mainland by the narrowest of narrows) made it look like a penis with personality? An erect penis with a noticeable rightward curve. His house was near the base of the left-hand side of this curvaceous, prancing, happy, circumcised cock.
    In watching him rapidly sketch the map, Dido Paris learned a few things and guessed a few others. Since Harry knew the coastline like the back of his hand, he must be a sailor, he must be happiest on water. His sketch was fast and deft and to the point. It showed no interest in the town itself,except insofar as Franklin Avenue ran down to the tip of the island-erection that bestrode the waters of Great Slave Lake. In manly capital letters he had written GIANT on the west shore of Back Bay and CON near Yellowknife Bay to indicate the two gold mines. But his focus was on the water and on inviting her, she assumed, to take an entertaining plunge.

 
     
 
    THE DAY AFTER HARRY BRAVED the station in order to see Dido, a cloud of weather so warm had