The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis Read Free Book Online Page B

some time in his workshop. More accurately, I floated half asleep, and Angus jitterbugged down to the boathouse, the two of us united in relief. He slipped the key into the ground-level door and waved me inside. I would much rather have climbed upstairs to bed, but he would not be denied. He turned on the light, and I stuck my head in. The skeleton of what I assumed to be the hovercraft – but to my untrained eye looked to be a boat – rested on two sawhorses in the middle of the room. Two large doors formed the north wall and obviously opened onto the river. A workbench, with what looked to me like tools of some kind strewn on it, stretched along the western wall.
    It’s probably worth noting that I’m not exactly what you’d call a handyman. For instance, four years earlier, I’d won a fancy, chrome-and-steel gas barbecue at a charity golf tournament. The barbecue required assembly. I gamely tried my hand at putting it together and worked steadily at it for my entire two-week summer vacation. In the end, it never became the barbecue pictured on the side of the box. In fact, when I gave up, it looked more like a miniature Frank Gehry opera house. I was left holding a bag with thirty-seven forgotten parts, some of which I figured must be important. I let the good folks at the Salvation Army figure it out and have since limited my do-it-yourself projects to replacing lightbulbs and setting up the card table, which I can now do inside of four minutes (though I need assistance putting it away). I’m still several years away from venturing anywhere near IKEA.
    Along the back wall, I saw a small desk, on which lay a large, brown, leather-bound notebook, open to what I assumed were the personal scrawlings of Angus McLintock. A battered wooden stool rested on the floor beneath. He discreetly closed the notebook andslid it into the top drawer. A small gas furnace squatted in the southeast corner with ducts heading up to my apartment. Two smallish windows in the east wall and four bright lights, suspended from the ceiling, completed the functional and cheerful workspace.
    I looked for a long time at what Angus had been building, trying like hell to divine which end was up. I also fought valiantly to keep my eyes open. Lateral ribs stretched across the vessel at two foot intervals, leaving only an open compartment in the middle that I took to be the cockpit (if
cockpit
is the right term in a hovercraft). Plywood covered the bottom as well as parts of the upper surface of the craft. An engine of some kind was positioned just behind the cockpit on a raised mounting bracket of some kind. I could see a fan housed in a duct beneath it. Two vents, open at either end, ran from stem to stern on either side of the hovercraft and seemed to open into the middle of the chamber immediately beneath the engine and fan. I noticed twin vanes in both ends of the two vents, which, I assumed, were there for steering. A rubber material had been sewn and attached to the periphery of the vehicle, making it look a little like a deflated Zodiac boat, minus the Greenpeace activists.
    “I’m glad that you know something about hovercraft. So few do,” Angus remarked as he rested his considerable keister on the edge of the workbench.
    My twenty minutes of Internet research on hovercraft had fed me the Christopher Cockerell card (which, at that moment, I regretted playing) but in no way equipped me with even the slightest idea of what I was looking at. Nevertheless, I stepped closer and feigned unparalleled interest, running my hand along the smooth plywood decking and battling the urge to sleep.
    “So this is it?” I said as I eyed the half-finished craft but visualized my bed.
    Aye.” Long pause.
    I yawned towards the engine. “And this would be the motor, no doubt.”
    “Aye.” He was smiling now.
    “I see.” I nodded and pursed my lips in a gesture of understanding. Angus just let me twist. After a few minutes of this, he must have grown