Late Nights on Air (3 page)

“You’re brave to have driven all this way.”

Gwen considered for a moment whether this made her brave. In truth, she was always afraid, always worried. She shook her head. “Like I said, I’ve wanted to come north for as long as I can remember.”

“Three thousand miles!”

“Yes,” still unimpressed by herself, “but I never went over fifty.”

Eleanor gave Gwen Symon a tour of the station, and for the next couple of days Gwen sat in master control with silent Eddy the red-headed tech and watched him operate the big console. She listened to the announcers, became familiar with their habits. There was the morning man, so prodigiously at ease on radio that it was like sleeping for him. The rest of his life was work—his troubled marriage, his full-time drinking—this was where he came to rest. There was the silver-haired
treaty Indian, trim and immaculate and quiet, who did the news in Dogrib. There was the restless, fast-talking Metis sportscaster, who also hosted the late afternoon request show, since in the Northern Service announcers did more than one job and operated the equipment for themselves, besides. There was the utterly reliable newsreader and host of Radio Noon, who was training Dido to take his place, since he would be leaving soon for a job in the south. And there was Dido, who struggled with pronunciation, but had the most beautiful speaking voice Gwen had ever heard.

As it turned out, Harry was indeed made acting manager.
Acting
, as head office took pains to point out, until a permanent manager was hired. Somebody had to cover temporarily, and Harry, despite his lamentable history, was the most experienced person at hand.

Gwen went to see him in his new office, the first room down the hall past Eleanor’s desk. She arrived just as he swivelled in his chair and picked up his phone, giving her his back but not because he meant to. She hovered at the open door, having nerved herself to enter, and now was unwilling to go away. She knew his voice. She’d heard him on her car radio as she drove the final leg to Yellowknife, drawn on by the endless light into a sunset that blended into sunrise, and accompanied for a while by this irreverent, handsome-sounding man who said things like, “The time may not be out of joint, but this joint is out of time.” Now here he was in the flesh and her sense of letdown was part of a larger disappointment, since the North looked nothing like what she’d expected either. It wasn’t a dramatic scene of rugged simplicity, rather, mile after mile of stunted trees covered with dust from the gravel road.

From the door she had a good view of the back of his balding head and his fat left ear. He hung up the phone, and she stepped all the way into his office, saying, “You don’t look
anything
like how you sound.”

Harry turned. He took off his glasses with one hand and studied her. “That,” he said gravely, “is the tragedy of radio.”

Gwen felt disarmed. Her face lit up, and Harry’s relaxed into a smile. The old seducer, mutual honesty, had walked in the door and joined them.

“You remind me of
Johnny
Q,” she said, voicing her sudden thought.

Her favourite comic strip growing up. On her stomach, the Saturday paper spread wide and still warm from having been under her bum all through lunch (staking her claim before her brother did), she drank in the intoxicating smell of newsprint—a potent, throat-catching, alcoholic smell—and devoured
On Stage
, the ongoing story of the actress Mary Perkins, who married the reporter Pete Fletcher, because he was handsome and reliable, even though she was deeply attracted to roguish Johnny Q of the cauliflower ear. Johnny Q came and went, other adventures intervened, but you always knew when he was back because his cauliflower ear appeared at the edge of the strip. Often his voice came first, a teasing sexy comment directed at a stewardess who was bringing him yet another drink. Then the back of his head appeared with the cauliflower ear jutting to one side. There was no greater pleasure in her childhood than knowing Johnny Q would be around for several weeks at least.

Harry Boyd wasn’t handsome, but he was appealing in his own idiosyncratic way. Polka-dot silk shirt, dress pants, tennis
sneakers. His face broad, underslept, middle-aged. Less a twinkle in his eye than an interested, half-irritated gleam. Like a pilot from the Second World War. Amused and thirsty.

“Sit down and make yourself homely.”

She sat across from him in his little office, and he asked her why she wanted a job in northern radio. Her answer surprised and gripped him. When she was a girl, she said, she heard a radio program about John Hornby, the Englishman who starved to death along with his young cousin Edgar Christian, and a third companion, Harold Adlard, when they over-wintered in the Barrens in 1927. She’d never forgotten it.

“‘Death in the Barren Ground.’” He leaned back in his chair. “Alan King took the role of Hornby, Douglas Rain was Edgar Christian. I think Bud Knapp did the narration. An incredible story,” he said, glad to be remembering it again. “George Whalley wrote the script.”

“And the biography too,” she said.
“The Legend of John Hornby
. I’ve read it three times.”

Her eagerness made Harry smile. “Whalley’s daughter lives here, you know. Just down the road from me on Latham Island. She told me her father’s really a Coleridge scholar. His obsession with Hornby is something he pursued on the side. His ‘love child’ she called it. I made her promise to bring him round and introduce him if he ever comes to Yellowknife.”

Gwen said, “I’ve wanted to make radio dramas ever since I heard that broadcast.”

Harry cradled his glasses in his left hand. “I hate to break it to you, but we’re a one-thousand-watt radio station. We don’t do drama.”

“Is that in the regulations?”

A simple question that scored a point without intending to.

Harry said, “You’ve got Hornby’s eyes. Has anybody told you that?” He pushed back and swung his feet up on his desk, a sign that he was interested, that she was worth his while. Harry had a weakness for shy, young travellers who’d fallen in love with the North, having been one himself. “So what was it about Hornby’s story that hooked you?”

Gwen didn’t hesitate. She told him it was Hornby’s feeling for the Barrens. She understood the pull of that sort of desolate, rugged landscape; it’s what made her travel a year ago to Newfoundland. The Barrens were far more remote, she knew, and even more dangerously exposed in the treeless interior of the Arctic. She wanted to see them too. And Hornby himself fascinated her, she said. He went to such extremes, getting by on so little, pushing himself to the brink. And then there was the way he died. He was to blame for what happened, but young Edgar never blamed him. That’s what she found so moving.

Harry was nodding. “It’s one of those unforgettable northern tales that break your heart.”

“But,” she leapt in, “it was a tragedy that avoided a greater tragedy, since they never turned against each other.”

His cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.

“I just mean,” and she stuttered a little and pulled at the jagged ends of her short brown hair, “I just mean sometimes people misunderstand each other after a while, and then they turn against each other. They don’t want to,” she said softly, “but they can’t help it.”

Harry felt suddenly alert. “That sounds like personal experience talking.”

He saw her move back in her chair and suspected he was right. “So how did you get to be so wise?”

It seemed she might not answer his question, but she did. “I read,” she smiled, and he chuckled. Small-town honesty. He could recognize it a mile away. Small-town honesty, and big- city drive.

The girl reminded him of somebody he hadn’t thought about for a long time. Somebody he’d met all too briefly at a reception years ago. A thin, young graduate student with short hair and a big shoulder bag into which she slipped food off the tables. She was making assiduous progress from the cheese to the butter tarts, wrapping the food in paper napkins, when he offered her a sausage roll for her collection, and her face crinkled with delight. How marvellous and rare, meeting a woman who liked to be teased. She made room for the sausage roll in her bag and he noticed the book tucked inside; the very book he was reading: Dashiell Hammett’s
The Thin Man
. Then she gave him a warm smile and continued to the end of the table and then out the side door. He should have gone after her, but he let her go. He let her slip through his fingers.

Gwen Symon had the same kind of smile. She was telling him that Yellowknife wasn’t what she’d expected, but the light was remarkable and she was looking forward to the darkness and cold of winter. And she could see that it was a place where anyone could make a fresh start.

“Why would
you
need a fresh start?” he asked. “You look almost prepubescent.”

Her sky-blue eyes stabbed him. She didn’t know the word, to her own surprise, and almost asked what it meant. Pre-what? Typewriters were clacking away on the other side
of the wall and she was aware that his eyes had shifted to the bruise on her throat. “Why not?” she said at last.

A surprisingly self-possessed response.
Why not?
Harry straightened his shoulders, swung his feet back on the floor. A fresh start was exactly what he needed too.

“We have an opening, it so happens. Actually, two openings. I need someone to replace me on the night shift and soon I’ll need a host for Radio Noon.” He began to shuffle papers on his desk. “You’re in luck. But whether we can
afford
to hire somebody else who needs to be trained is another matter. I know this will surprise the hell out of the
CBC
, but I’m a cheap bastard.” Without looking at her, he spread his arms and lifted his shoulders. “I can’t help it.”

“Mr. Boyd,” she said. “Mr. Boyd!” Leaning forward to get his attention.

“Harry’s the name.”

“I’m
cheaper.”
Her eyes were bright, sharp, amused.

“You are?” His own eyes widened to take in this suddenly competitive girl.
“How
cheap?”

She was wearing sandals. Never in her life had she paid full price for sandals.

She raised her foot. “End of summer sale.”

He pointed to his own feet. “Salvation Army.”

That’s where Gwen got her brassieres.

Harry said, “In Mexico I bargained so hard the street vendors turned their backs on me and walked away. I’m so cheap that when I go out with my buddies I forget to take my wallet.”

“I’ve never sunk that low,” she said.

“Honey, you don’t know what my life has been like.”

It wasn’t hard, what she did next. Turning the conversation. Most men love to talk about themselves to women, even to a woman like her. “What has your life been like?” she asked, and he told her about what he called the violet hours of drinking that followed on the heels of his television disgrace, when he found himself eating corn flakes with a shoehorn since he didn’t own a spoon. “I was no good on television,” he said, expecting her to contradict him. But she didn’t.

“My father was a drinker,” she said.

“Then you know every sordid detail. You’re not frightened.”

“Not of that.”

Harry waved her into the studio, the door of which was only a few feet from Eleanor’s desk. He handed her the news story lying on the table, told her where to sit, lowered the microphone to her small, thin face. Then he went back out and down the hall to master control and asked Eddy to slap up a tape.

The studio in which Gwen sat at a big baize-covered table had an upright piano in the corner, and she wondered if musicians came in to play on air. The studio was connected by a picture window to master control, which was connected in the same way to the announce booth and the editing booth beyond that. She could see the length of the little station and into the hallway too. And thus she was inducted into the visibility and invisibility of radio, the intimacy and the isolation. Harry turned on his mike and spoke to her through the glass: Introduce yourself, then read the news story.

It was a story about a single car crash near Fort Rae, a settlement seventy miles west of Yellowknife. The car had skidded
on loose gravel and had gone out of control on a lonely curve of bumpy road, the so-called highway she’d driven on to get to Yellowknife. The man had been killed, the woman escaped with minor cuts. Five dogs were in the car at the time of the accident, one of them still hadn’t been recovered.

Harry listened. He pulled a notepad out of his back pocket and jotted down:
Interesting. Monotonous. Worth a chance
.

“What do you think, Eddy?” he said.

“Not great,” said Eddy.

“Not yet.”

There was something about her voice. It sounded parched and boyish and defenceless, a little like Douglas Rain’s voice -the eerie, naked, innocent quality he brought to Edgar Christian, the seventeen-year-old cousin who accompanied Hornby into the Barrens and stayed loyal until his last breath.

The next day Harry offered Gwen a summer contract as an announcer-operator, thinking of it as a trial run, and she accepted.

Gwen asked herself later why she agreed to the job. Why would someone who wanted to be in the background agree to be in the foreground? It was the only job going, she told herself. Then why was she so ecstatic about the prospect of being on air?