Late Nights on Air Read Free Page A

descended that Eleanor Dew went for a long walk before bed. She lived in the new part of town, in a basic but comfortable trailer home not far from Frame Lake. Occasionally that night she felt a cool breeze come off the water. Otherwise, warmth descended from the sky, then a little soft rain. The next morning the air outside was like one of those so-called white children—hair so blond it’s white—a heavy mist obscuring the trailer next door. She was reminded of her grandfather, who had washed his fine head of white hair once a week with Old Dutch Cleanser.
    This was the day Gwen Symon came into the station for the first time, and nobody noticed. It was the third day of June, a Tuesday.
    Eleanor was caught up in playful banter with Ralph Cody, the freelance book reviewer. “You’ve drunk nineteen cups of coffee already. Do you plan to stay awake for a month?”
    Ralph was a small man, about sixty, in a tweed jacket with patched elbows. His appetite for talk was barely whetted by the ten minutes allowed him on air. His teeth were darkly stained with coffee and tobacco. His nicotined hands were the smallest, daintiest hands Eleanor had ever seen on a man.The two of them were discussing discomfort, how much better everyone used to be at enduring it, but especially the voyageurs during the fur trade and all the storied travellers in the Arctic.
    Gwen stood there. They weren’t aware of her. Or pretended they weren’t. After a moment she said, “Some of those travellers weren’t comfortable unless they were
un
comfortable.”
    Then they looked over and saw a pair of shocking blue eyes coming straight at them out of a young woman’s white face. She had a large bruise on her throat—the size of a dollar bill torn in half, the purple ten-dollar bill. Dead-white skin (as white, thought Eleanor, as someone’s feet, in shoes all year round, might be). A very bad haircut. And those blue eyes.
    “Where did
you
come from?” asked Ralph.
    “I just arrived,” she said, and pointed out the window to the soft-shaped, ten-year-old Volvo parked in the street. Attached to it was a very small trailer.
    She said, “I was wondering. Who could I talk to about a job?”
    They established that she was twenty-four, she’d driven from Georgian Bay in Ontario, more than three thousand miles, camping in her trailer along the way, and if she could find work she would stay for a while. In Toronto she’d been told that anyone as inexperienced in radio as she was should try the hinterlands first.
    Ralph’s lips twitched in amusement; he could just picture some bureaucrat with a grand vocabulary. “So you came all this way to be on air.”
    “Not on air,” came the hasty answer. “In the background. And I came all this way for other reasons too. I’ve always wanted to see the North.”
    It turned out she was intent on becoming a script assistant for radio drama.
    “I don’t mean to be harsh,” said Ralph, “but have you been listening to the radio up here? Have you heard any radio dramas? Have you even heard a skit?”
    “I think you need them,” she said quietly.
    Ah, thought Eleanor. She had trapped a mouse in her trailer a few days ago and this girl was just as subtle in her camouflage: a buff-grey shirt with a pale brown collar, and darker brown pants. No adornment except for the impressive bruise on her throat. An embarrassment, that, or something worse. But her sense of purpose was unmistakable, it cut through the static of her pale, brown personality. Someone else to watch. The girl’s face was flushed now, the underarms of her shirt visibly wet. And Eleanor was reminded of her aunt who had to towel herself dry after she spoke on the telephone, the effort took so much out of her. Yet this same aunt had travelled cities the world over, and she’d done it alone.
    This place could be the making of you, Eleanor thought, smiling at Gwen. But then everyone thought the North would be the making of them, as she knew perfectly