Minister Without Portfolio (2 page)

Henry would receive strength from the walls of this basement just as that man Noyce had. Noyce is a spiritual man and so will I be. On Saturdays Henry played with John and Silvia's kids and took them to lunch at a diner downtown. Over hamburgers and pea soup he saw a woman in a gallery falling a hundred times in three hours, one time for each Canadian soldier dead in Afghanistan. She did this in a gallery with a window onto the restaurant where he was eating his hamburger. He did not like art particularly, but there was something in the woman he liked. Henry was not shy. He was a guy who handled polyethylene tubing and connected electrodes to cured cement but he was not flummoxed by a performance artist. He crossed the street with the kids and opened the door to the gallery and asked the artist where she got the idea. She told Henry about this residency with the military. They have artists who accompany the army to the Arctic or, in this case, Afghanistan. She returned and felt compelled to become each soldier that had fallen.

He never saw this woman again but it made him think about John Hynes's notion of a contract in Kabul.

4

Rick Tobin was three years older than John and Henry and Tender Morris but they knew him growing up in the west end of St John's. Little Rick like a bantam cock in his blue coveralls, all hundred and forty pounds of him bounding into things. Rick had energy that bewildered Henry and he was not the first to realize Rick could channel this force into ambition and drive and learn how to connect labour with materials and funnel them into the delivery of services to small towns along the shore. It floored him, how successful Rick was. He had married Colleen Grandy and moved into her town which was down the road from where John and Silvia had a summer house. Renews. Tender Morris had been left a house there too by a great-aunt, a house Tender Morris was going to fix up some day if he ever got out of the military. Henry asked Rick if he worried about leaving the city for such a small place.

I'm never home, Rick said. If Colleen is happy then I'm happy.

Henry had visited Renews a few times, but living in a small place was not something that had appealed to him. He appreciated a city giving you a movie to watch, rather than
having to constantly make your own movie. Rural areas were for excursions.

Henry and John and Tender, in their twenties, had gone to work for Rick. One time they set some dynamite to blow up virgin land in a new subdivision that was being cut out of the woods. There was concern for the fallout, so Rick had everyone park their vehicles around the perimeter of the blast site to act as a buffer. Rick pressed the button and the earth lifted a little. There was a whump and the sound of tinfoil crumpling. The surface of the denuded land was torn away and all was silent, and then soil fell on them, entire root systems, and when they got up off the ground they could see that the windows in all the vehicles were blown in. The performance metrics on this job, Rick said, are a little askew.

A few years ago Rick had 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.

5

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 to
know 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.

6

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 goalie. You'll stay where the tradespeople camp out, Tender said. A secure area, inside the wire. A separate facility from the army station but protected by our Canadian compound. He smacked the steering wheel hard when
he said protected. Beds are better, food is better, wages: better. So fuck you and fuck your benefits. I'll tell you the one thing before you get all superior on me: you're not as safe. Tender's eyes patrolling the small houses and gates and vast blank areas of sand and rock and garbage. He was a reservist who volunteered for combat and was enjoying every minute of it. He was alive. On the safety issue I got to show you something, he said. Under your seat, John.

John pulled out a heavy padded envelope. Inside, wrapped in clear bubblepack, the shapes of flat heavy things. John tore off the tape. Two dull metallic Sig Sauer automatic pistols slipped onto his lap.

I couldn't find ammo and I want those back when you go home, Tender said.

The gun was heavier than it looked and Henry shoved it in his jacket pocket and made sure the velcro flap was sealed.

Tender drove them into Kabul. There was a pig's head on the ground beside a shaded cart and boys on skateboards zipped through the white rubble of an old government building. Tender drove through this into a quieter neighbourhood with high metal gates and the tops of established trees, their leaves covered in dust. He stopped the jeep behind a line of new black cars and climbed out and rapped on a gate made of galvanized metal. It was very loud. The sun was just setting. A rusted slit opened in the gate and Tender told them he had two civilians who'd like to eat. They're looking for Chinese food, a voice said, just the top of a lip available at the slit in the gate. The gate pulled open and they walked into a cement courtyard. Razorwire on the walls. The lip of the man was not there.

Look, Tender said, and took Henry in a headlock and rubbed
his head. I heard about Nora. This is a good spot to forget about Nora.

I need to get her out of my head too, John said.

You, Tender said, have to be good.

The building was stucco and inside it suddenly got dark, men at small tables with white tablecloths, a music in the walls, men from various non-governmental agencies and tourists, Tender said. There were guns on the table. Two men studying the steel tang in a big knife, passing it back and forth almost in wonder as to how the metal got in there. A string of lamps shone over a buffet table with stainless steel trays full of vegetables and meat. The light bounced in a dazzle off the food but the food itself was dead. Around the buffet were perhaps a dozen Chinese women in tight tops with bare arms collecting white plates. They had red bows around their necks that somehow kept their dark hair pinned up and they were listlessly bending over the food to prepare the plates and then delivering these plates into corners of the darkness with some accelerated urgency.

They took a table near the back wall by a hall to what was the washrooms and one of the servers came over. Her fingers touched the edge of the table. In English that was both bright and bored: What would you like, a drink? She was wearing a simple black and white outfit and you saw her midriff directly in front of your eyes—there was a lively rhinestone stuck to the bellybutton—and her shoulders were bare and a number of buttons undone at the cleavage. She was serving the food and opening up tabs on cans of beer and glasses of crushed ice and soda and small plastic bottles of hard liquor like you get on an airplane.

This man here needs a full service, Tender said about Henry. And we're his friends who will take care of his bill.

I might need a little dessert, John said. Tender shoved him. Or watch some dessert.

They ate and drank and Henry asked about the barracks and Tender said it was not a problem.

They were all suddenly ravenous and they ordered more food. The crushed ice and little bottles kept arriving. The ice was almost the same as the ice of home but there was no doubting that everything was different here. The air rubbed the surfaces of things in a different way. He slammed her with a beginner's zeal, John whispered. There was a burr to everything. Henry drank his drink and another little bottle arrived and the screw caps required elbow work. The cap she is very small. Henry, the next day, could only remember being led down that hallway past the washrooms where the quality of the paint and the cleanliness of things seemed to become less interested in convincing you the establishment was high grade. There was music in a grate. Lie down here, sir. A ceiling and the top of a heavy curtain that he guessed covered a window. Perhaps it gave you the comfort of a window but there was no window. He was taken care of on a rubber mattress and a cloth on his belly and then his friends brought him back to the jeep and the compound and to a bed with a thin camping mattress, the sun was already hanging over the low, flat city.

7

Rick Tobin came over for the first three months. He was part of a larger contingent—SNC-Lavalin—that repaired water and sewage and revamped wiring and took care of waste management for the Canadian forces even as they were participating in the draw-down of operations at Camp Julien. They provide warehousing, Rick said. Transportation, bulk fuel management, vehicle maintenance, food services, communication services, electricity, water supply and distribution.

Rick used up all his fingers and he hadn't even gotten to the Nepalese who took care of the cooking and cleaning.

Everything, he said, to operate this facility and maintain it.

Rick Tobin, believe it or not, was also a mini-soccer coach. He organized Afghan and Nepalese children on the army base, and dribbled out free soccer balls inflated by his own tire pump he'd packed in his checked baggage.

They had to wait to use the computers to skype home. It was one of the services the trades and soldiers shared. Tender was talking to his girlfriend, Martha Groves. Stripped to his waist with dogtags on his collarbones, a tattoo of some kind across the
back of his neck, Tender sat with other soldiers in the dark at blue screens manoeuvring the cursor over to the panels that allowed their loved ones to see their faces. John Hynes sat next to him, his face turned from concentration on figuring out the connection to a relief at seeing the top of his son's head too close to the built-in camera, Silvia grabbing at Clem's shoulders to get him and Sadie steady and then all of them synchronized to a connection no longer staggered. Tender's girlfriend on the screen now, a beauty. The beauty came from a confidence to be on a screen projected over eight thousand miles. Henry knew Martha. She was a physiotherapist—that's how Tender met her, a hockey injury. She wasn't from St John's, was she. No, she didn't know Colleen and Silvia and Nora the way they knew each other from school. But they had included her. How vulnerable they all looked sitting on steno chairs at the little booths inside the tent that reminded Henry of a time when he took John's kids, Clem and Sadie, to a jumpy castle.

You want to grab this one after me, Tender said.

It's okay, Henry said.

Say hello to Martha.

Hello Martha.

She waved at Henry while she looked a little up, into the green dot he guessed that made sure you were being screened properly. My god, Henry thought, how can it be I have no one to talk to.