Minister Without Portfolio Read Free

bought nine second-hand dumptrucks from Alberta and shipped them here. He went halves on a sawmill in Horsechops Lane and became principal owner of a lounge in Fermeuse, the Copper Kettle. He snapped up two big boats from the classifieds, forty-footers, when the snow crab fishery collapsed. John explained that Rick Tobin was constructing an old folks’ home up the shore, and he’ll take the senior citizens out in the wilderness area on the crab boats and then, if all goes well, they’ll lose all their money on the video lottery terminals at the Copper Kettle.
    Henry was in this bar once and Rick called him over. Hey Henry. Rick bought him a beer. Then said Henry there’s a man at the door I have to have a word with. He went over there. Rick obviously a small guy. It got loud, and Rick wiped the floor with him, then took him outside and kicked him down the handicapped ramp. That guy owed me three hundred dollars.
    He’s buying land in Costa Rica, John said, to grow trees. Teak wood, he said, you can’t get your arms around it. He wants to set the sawmill right here and ship the teak up. He asked me to supervise the mill. You can have all the teak you want, he said. Teak is twenty-seven dollars a board foot, Henry.

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    You can say no to Rick and that’s okay, he’ll find other people and other plans. Such is what happened with John, and the sawmill and Costa Rica went bye-bye. Tender, oddly enough, moved to Nova Scotia and stayed in a Buddhist monastery. Then he returned and joined the reserves. Some kind of spiritual vexation, John said. And this Kabul gig—the money is good and Silvia is behind it.
    She’s not delighted but she’s okay with it, Henry said.
    They have family to help with the kids. You sign on for a year with one trip home and four-day stints touching down in the United Arab Emirates. Health, dental, a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy—put down one of my kids, Henry. Security provided by her majesty’s government. Tender Morris will take care of us.
    Live a dangerous life. The one unsmooth element in the story of Rick’s life around the bay was the rumour that his wife was having an affair. Colleen Grandy. That spiritual American who had lived in John and Silvia’s finished basement and bought the lightkeeper’s house in Renews. Noyce. Everyone seemed toknow about this affair except Rick. Or if Rick knew he did not let on and, like the fight in the bar over three hundred dollars, he wasn’t the type of man to absorb nuance. Who is to know how couples arrange their lives? On financial matters Rick had life solved and he wanted to share that solution with his friends. He sent the international paperwork and Silvia printed off the forms and spread out the duplicate papers on the dining room table while the kids ate a bucket of chicken on the carpet with paper towels and root beer. John and Henry initialled each page of the agreement and signed their names and Silvia witnessed it. Airplane tickets arrived as a PDF on Silvia’s laptop.

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    They flew west to Toronto and then east to Frankfurt and south to Kabul. In the airport in Toronto they saw a woman with a golden retriever on her way back to Connecticut. John asked her about the dog—John will talk to anybody with a dog. She was bringing the dog to a family. She was blind and the dog was eleven years old and starting to fail, so the dog had to go and she would get another dog in two weeks. But she was heartbroken about the dog.
    The only thing interesting about the Frankfurt airport was a ceramic fly that told you where to point your stream of piss in the urinals.
    Tender Morris met them at the airport in Kabul. He was in a green jeep called an Iltis. I’m to escort you to barracks, he said. Tender a tall, rangy man with red hair and long, involved tattoos. His real name was Patrick, but he’d been called Tender since high school—he’d been their hockey