Late Nights on Air Read Free Page B

well. That’s exactly what led to so many disasters.
    Eleanor told young Gwen that she wasn’t sure who she should talk to, since their station manager had absconded. Ralph cracked that where he came from it was the weather that was transient: all you had to do was wait five minutes if youdidn’t like it; here, all you had to do was wait five minutes if you didn’t like the people.
    Eleanor laughed and went on to say that head office had been talking to Harry Boyd and she guessed they would ask him to step into the breach.
    “What if I watched in the meantime,” said Gwen. “I could learn a lot by watching.”
    “Have you got a place to stay?”
    Gwen indicated her little Boler trailer parked outside, and Eleanor offered her own backyard as a parking place until she found an apartment.
    “You’re brave to have driven all this way.”
    Gwen considered for a moment whether this made her brave. In truth, she was always afraid, always worried. She shook her head. “Like I said, I’ve wanted to come north for as long as I can remember.”
    “Three thousand miles!”
    “Yes,” still unimpressed by herself, “but I never went over fifty.”
    Eleanor gave Gwen Symon a tour of the station, and for the next couple of days Gwen sat in master control with silent Eddy the red-headed tech and watched him operate the big console. She listened to the announcers, became familiar with their habits. There was the morning man, so prodigiously at ease on radio that it was like sleeping for him. The rest of his life was work—his troubled marriage, his full-time drinking—this was where he came to rest. There was the silver-hairedtreaty Indian, trim and immaculate and quiet, who did the news in Dogrib. There was the restless, fast-talking Metis sportscaster, who also hosted the late afternoon request show, since in the Northern Service announcers did more than one job and operated the equipment for themselves, besides. There was the utterly reliable newsreader and host of Radio Noon, who was training Dido to take his place, since he would be leaving soon for a job in the south. And there was Dido, who struggled with pronunciation, but had the most beautiful speaking voice Gwen had ever heard.
    As it turned out, Harry was indeed made acting manager.
Acting
, as head office took pains to point out, until a permanent manager was hired. Somebody had to cover temporarily, and Harry, despite his lamentable history, was the most experienced person at hand.
    Gwen went to see him in his new office, the first room down the hall past Eleanor’s desk. She arrived just as he swivelled in his chair and picked up his phone, giving her his back but not because he meant to. She hovered at the open door, having nerved herself to enter, and now was unwilling to go away. She knew his voice. She’d heard him on her car radio as she drove the final leg to Yellowknife, drawn on by the endless light into a sunset that blended into sunrise, and accompanied for a while by this irreverent, handsome-sounding man who said things like, “The time may not be out of joint, but this joint is out of time.” Now here he was in the flesh and her sense of letdown was part of a larger disappointment, since the North looked nothing like what she’d expected either. It wasn’t a dramatic scene of rugged simplicity, rather, mile after mile of stunted trees covered with dust from the gravel road.
    From the door she had a good view of the back of his balding head and his fat left ear. He hung up the phone, and she stepped all the way into his office, saying, “You don’t look
anything
like how you sound.”
    Harry turned. He took off his glasses with one hand and studied her. “That,” he said gravely, “is the tragedy of radio.”
    Gwen felt disarmed. Her face lit up, and Harry’s relaxed into a smile. The old seducer, mutual honesty, had walked in the door and joined them.
    “You remind me of
Johnny
Q,” she said, voicing her sudden thought.
    Her favourite