Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay Read Free Book Online Page A

met—amused—and Eleanor forgot about Gwen for the moment.
    “When can I move in?” asked Dido.
    “Tomorrow, if you like.”
    Lucky Dido. For almost a year she’d been sharing a small bungalow with two other women who didn’t know the meaning of the words
quiet
or
clean
, and it was more like camping out than living. Tomorrow she would move her things into the small and tidy bedroom left vacant by Eleanor’s previous roommate, who’d decided suddenly she couldn’t face one more day in Yellowknife, let alone one more winter. Dido would have the run of the mobile home, the use of Eleanor’s books, the pleasure of her civilized company at a monthly rent that was lower by a third than what she’d been paying. I’ll stay here one more year, Dido thought, and then I’ll go somewhere entirely different.

    One night in mid-June Dido and a former teaching colleague went to a party in Old Town that featured caribou burgers and kegs of beer. On a big deck overlooking a rocky slope with the bay in the distance, she discovered a crowd of strangers, men with huge bellies and heavy-handed hospitality and horrible opinions. She wondered if Texas was like this. She heard someone say, “If you’re a white man, vote for a white man.” She heard someone else say, “Any girl can type. We’ll just drag a squaw in off the streets.”
    Dido saw the racism more clearly, seeing it with a newcomer’s eyes. These were businessmen who believed the North belonged to them. They smelled money, she thought. They couldn’t wait for the gas and oil to flow, and so they had no time for the inquiry into the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline. They hated the tax dollars it was soaking up and the delays it was causing. They resented the platform it was giving to natives, environmentalists, do-gooders of every stripe. They belittled the government-appointed judge who was running it.
Berger
. She heard the name being bandied about with contempt. But the pipeline was going ahead, she also heard them say, nothing would stop it. Government was behind it, big money was behind it, real northerners like themselves, who put their shoulders to the wheel and prospered, they were behind it.
    Overhead were ravens and lake gulls, all around were low hills made of the oldest rock in the world bathed by the most beautiful light on earth, and lovely miniature birches, and small flowers clinging and spreading. Dido had learned recently that this rock was the very rock she had failed to drive tent pegs into three thousand miles away in Ontario, on an ill-conceivedcamping trip with her ex-husband: it was all part of the great Canadian Shield, a connection that ran deep and underfoot, though on the surface it failed to bring even two quarrelsome people together.
    After a while, she gravitated towards a less crowded corner of the deck and saw Eddy leaning on the railing, his loose hips, long legs. He was staring off into the distance. She glanced his way several times, but not once did he acknowledge her. She went to stand next to him. She rested her arms on the railing beside his, and he said to her, “These people are despicable.”
    “Then we agree about something.”
    He looked her in the face, his eyes full of anger. “Racists run the show up here,” he said.
    “I know.”
    His harshness appealed to her and surprised her. She began to ask him about himself, and he responded and not with small talk.
    He’d grown up in California, the son of a house builder who died at the age of thirty-eight, leaving his mom with three kids and no money. Now his troubled boyhood had been stirred up again by the sudden death of his sister-in-law, who’d left behind a little girl, only five years old. He’d been five, too, when his father died.
    “How did he die, your father?”
    “He was up on a roof and they say he lost his balance.”
    His voice was quiet and clean, she thought, unlike Harry’s fleshy growl. Eddy was leaning back now, against the railing, his fingers