Snow Job (56 page)

Arthur thanked him for this update, and carried on to join the
folks massing by the balloon. It was tethered to a stripped-down chassis, the propane burners on low burn in the gondola, an oversized basket. Stoney was in there, doing last-minute checks, Dog standing beside him, looking decidedly ill at ease in his hockey regalia.

Stoney turned to the eager watchers, grinning. “Houston, do you read? All systems are go.” His own system, however, seemed less primed. Crawling over the basket’s guardrail, he floundered and fell, losing one of his untied sneakers. He brushed himself off, weaved over to the tether rope, slurring: “Ladies and genermen, you are about to observe hishtory in the making.”

The Starkers event had clearly done him severe damage. Arthur could only hope that Dog wasn’t similarly challenged. His impulse was to demand a halt to this, but he hesitated, not wanting to act the wet blanket.

“Turn up the burner, Dog!” Then: “We have liftoff!”

As the balloon suddenly rose, Stoney followed. Somehow, in the process of untying the tether rope, he had looped it around his wrist. His ground crew, led by Hamish McCoy, led a dash to catch him by his remaining sneaker, but it came off in their hands. Stoney spiralled into the sky, clutching the rope, caterwauling: “Turn down the burner, Dog! Turn
down
that burner! Move! Open the vent!”

The test pilot was immobile, staring down at him over the rim of the basket, but he finally came out of his fugue and set frantically to his task. By this time, they were floating above the Shewfelts’ roof. Sheep were stampeding in the pasture across the road.

“Turn the burner
down
, I said! Not
off!
” This final instruction came too late: the balloon quickly went limp, and in seconds Stoney was entangled in plastic hooves and antlers, the entire rooftop display collapsing, with Rudolph going stiff-legged over the edge, plummeting to the Shewfelts’ walkway and shattering into shards of plastic. The gondola came to rest on Santa’s sleigh, Dog crawling from under the fabric of the balloon.

Mrs. Shewfelt ran from the house screaming, and her husband came barrelling out after her, knocking over lawn elves like bowling pins as he bolted to the safety of the road.

Everyone watched, stunned and silent, until Stoney rose in a tangle of Christmas lights, barefoot and dishevelled. Then they all whooped and cheered.

“Y
ou got troubles, partner?”

Thiessen’s reddened eyes rose from contemplation of his pint of ale and sought focus on the weather-beaten face of the character on the adjoining barstool, a trapper maybe, or a prospector.

“I got troubles,” Thiessen said.

“Wife?”

“Not yet. But those are coming.” The bar was called Gold Diggers, a log structure in Yellowknife’s Old Town, poorly lit, good for hiding in. His searchers hadn’t found him here, nor in his new digs at Captain Ron’s Bed and Breakfast. They’d finally given up, fled back to Ottawa.

“With me, it was wife,” said the grizzled man. “Kicked me out on my patoot.” Late forties, fifties, it was hard to tell. Salt-and-pepper hair, a full set of whiskers, his nose and earlobes scarred from frostbite. “Things went downhill from there.”

“With me …” Thiessen shrugged. “I just blew it.” He was sporting a five-day stubble. He’d put away his suits — he wasn’t Charley any more — and clad himself in newly bought work clothes, a floppy hat to shade his eyes. Longjohns. He was determined to survive up here.

“You new in town?” the stranger asked.

“Yeah. Getting my bearings.”

“I just rode in myself. So what’s going on in the world? Haven’t seen a paper in months.”

“Not much.”

“You on the run?”

“Guess you could say. Starting over.” Thiessen took a gulp from his pint, wiped his lips, saw that the other guy only had a coffee. “Buy you something stronger?”

“Wouldn’t mind. I am currently resource depleted, as they say in the prospecting business.” He called the bartender. “Same as my buddy here.” To Thiessen: “Starting over? At what?”

“Thought I might open a law practice.”

The prospector grunted, a kind of laugh. “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a rooster?”

Thiessen canvassed his wide inventory of lawyer jokes. No roosters. “I give up.”

“When a rooster wakes up in the morning, its primal urge is to cluck defiance.”

Thiessen laughed when he finally got it.

“UBC, class of eighty-seven,” the prospector said.

“You’re
also
a lawyer?”

“Was. Where’d you practice? You look familiar.”

“Ontario. Stint in Ottawa. Made the mistake of getting into politics.” Thiessen sensed he was getting a physical once-over, his broad shoulders, his thick, pink fingers.

“Those hands ever seen a pick and shovel?”

“Not for a while.”

“You look like you played a little football in your time.”

“Winning tackle in the Vanier Cup, 1990.”

“Shouldn’t take long to shape you up.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ve got rights to an assload of gold, a registered claim up by Nanacho Lake. The project needs a small cash infusion. I’m looking for the right kind of partner.”

Maybe it was empty talk, but sometimes you stumble into things.
Thiessen wasn’t going to hand over any blank cheques, but this could be the new life foretold by those dancing northern lights, God’s portent, a divination.

His new friend stuck out his hand. “Brian Pomeroy.”

“Call me Chuck.”

After dinner, his blood still racing from the hot-air disaster movie, Arthur took to his club chair with a pile of unread magazines. But he couldn’t concentrate. Not because of the sniping from the living room over a game of Boggle, but a feeling, still plaguing him, that one of his regular, tedious duties had gone ignored since his return from Europe. Some odious task, like cleaning the toilet or disposing of dead mice …

It came to him he hadn’t looked at his emails for almost three weeks; a prospect so dreadful he’d repressed it. In Arthur’s view, the world had been more civilized before electronic mail, less threatening — who knew when some clicking error would unleash a penis-enhancing deluge, or viruses or worms or adware or whatever they call those things that broadcast your every taste and inclination.

Surely if something was important, the concerned party would phone.

But to dampen the niggling worry that some message of worth was craving attention in his in-box, he rose with a sigh and slumped into his desk chair and turned on the computer and watched his creaky old monitor display a series of accusatory messages — impossible to get rid of — complaining of files not found.

Finally, the computer let him open his mail program. He was dismayed by the flood pouring in, as if from a burst dam. Uncaught spam whirled by, news updates, notes from lawyers, friends, acquaintances barely remembered, plaintive pleas from Wentworth Chance.

When the storm finally let up, he grappled with the thought of adjourning this task until the morning, when he’d have more vigour. But as he idly scrolled through the bulging account, a sender caught his eye: [email protected]. It rolled past, and he feared he’d lost it, but finally zeroed in on it. It had arrived two weeks ago, Sunday, January 2, at just after eight in the morning here. Five p.m. in Tirana. An hour before DiPalma was found hanging from a beam.

Arthur felt a little wobbly, and before opening the message he went to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of the spicy herbal tea that Savannah kept in a thermos. On his return, as he passed by the living room, she and Zack looked up from their Boggle game. “You okay?” she asked.

“Me? Oh, fine, yes. No problem.”

He quietly shut the parlour door, and clicked on the wrong message, from Cinny who wanted to meet him. Finally, DiPalma’s letter came up on the screen. He printed out its several pages and retreated with his tea to his club chair, adjusted the lamp, and began reading …