Midnight Light, page 21
Over the next few days at the newspaper, John was in and out of Bruce’s office, “wound tighter than a two-dollar watch,” he said. He looked even more sleepless than usual, his face drained of its natural animation. He came to work wearing a laundry-pile Hawaiian shirt and shorts and sandals, as if waiting for a cruise ship that would never come. The paper closed ranks to decide what to do. With the story all over town—CBC, the Moose, and Edge YK all covered it soup to nuts—the Yellowknifer decided to show neither support nor indictment of the writer. They played the middle, as Bruce suggested they would. They ran a photo that, even though it was a colour pic, looked like a mugshot. John wasn’t quoted—nobody expected him to be—but Bruce wasn’t either (the story said that he’d refused comment, which I thought was the most meta-Yellowknifer moment of all time). John felt spurned, partly because in his eyes the paper hadn’t stood up for one of their writers—one of their allegedly assaulted writers—and partly because, after other reporters read the story, no one had come over to ask how he was doing or if he needed any help, worried, perhaps, about how such a gesture might play out with their bosses. Bruce removed John from the crime beat and laid it in Shawn’s hands. If Shawn was already overwhelmed, the extra work nearly wrenched the life out of him. Everybody was drained, and now this. It didn’t help that the junior reporter now occupied the beat of the person sitting next to him in the newsroom, who rubbed his forehead wondering how things could possibly get any worse. It was, at best, a divisive reassignment, and because Mike and Ellen had taken their holidays at what would turn out to be the worst possible time, it fell to Bruce to recalibrate office tensions, something he was challenged to do, spending most of his time removed from the news force. John didn’t write much—“The situation is too toxic right now,” said Bruce—and instead he slumped in his chair, taking defeated smoke breaks, where he told me, “I’m about this far away from quitting and leaving this fucking place,” showing a distance between his thumb and forefinger. His nights were spent at the Black Knight looking around the room and pointing suspiciously at the RCMP personnel in the bar: “That guy, that guy, that woman, that guy…” I didn’t think he had to worry about being watched—it’s not as if he became more clandestine, either, when it came to drinking or smoking weed—but after heading to the washroom, I looked into the bottom of a urinal to find John’s business card lying on the blue mat soaked with piss. I moved to another urinal.
There were still stories to write, papers to make. The following day, I sat at my computer terminal listening to John struggle with his breath—his asthma had worsened with the anxieties that came with a potential two-year maximum sentence in the North Slave Correctional Centre—while writing bumpf about the 150th anniversary of the Twin Otter, working the keyboard with single tired taps instead of the flurry by which he attacked his rig. We’d gone to the airport for the event—maple sugar squares and a constituency of airplane nerds in red commemorative hats—winding past the Yellowknife golf course, where, in the late 1940s, a DC-3 crash-landed on the first tee and was, according to Mordecai Richler, “immediately converted into the golf course’s first amenity (a clubhouse), filling that office until 1952, when an American order recalled every DC-3 in good enough condition to fly,” hauling it away and sending it into battle during the Korean War.
John was so distraught that he asked me to drive the company car, even though, because of insurance issues, I wasn’t supposed to. Since there was no drive-check program in Yellowknife—“It’s impossible to get arrested for impaired driving here,” he told me, sounding like someone who’d tested and re-tested the theory—I took the wheel and we headed to the hangar through the rain, which was another thing: in a semi-desert climate with annual precipitation, including snow, of just under thirty centimetres, the weather suddenly turned. After John’s arrest, the skies emptied for the first time all summer: nearly two days of dark clouds sitting overhead like players in a rugby scrum, pushing back and forth into each other, but never away.
Mark Heyck, the mayor, was at the hangar. He couldn’t believe what John was telling him: how he’d been thrown in jail for taking pictures. John repeated his mantra, “Two beers and a Caesar!”—I thought it was a good name for a party rock band—and he asked the mayor: “You saw me. Was I impaired? Was I intoxicated? Was I being belligerent?” The mayor answered that he hadn’t been.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you,” said John, pacing the ground and assembling the first few pieces of his defence.
John felt persecuted and his sense of self-worth was fragile. In the North, it was hard enough to be alone as well as persecuted and alone. Also, because he’d come and gone from so many media outlets, you wouldn’t have blamed him for wondering whether it was happening all over again—bad shit coming down and finding him because of the way he carried himself and the way he lived. Even at the best of times, he was an alarm bell waiting to go off. In one two-week span, he was given a black eye by Julius after a money dispute, the first of three fistfights he’d have with his roommate; was told he had to clear out of his cabin and find a place to live by his landlady, who sneered at him and said “I don’t like you” after John made an offhand compliment about her legs; and set the Yellowknifer building’s security systems off when coming in to get his camera during a late-night house-fire call. Wherever he went, all anyone wanted to talk about was what he’d allegedly done, what the cops had allegedly done, and what he thought might happen. On top of his foghorn voice and machine-gun laugh—there were times when John and I would be talking on a residential street, only to have neighbours come out and tell us to quiet down—the reporter had a target on his back. For some people, John’s arrest was a case of a fuck-up finally fucking up, and a lot of people steered clear of his presence, worrying how they would be perceived. “He’s a heat-seeking missile,” said Glenn, “and not in a good way.”
A few days into the mess, I received a gift from muckrakers’ heaven, which I imagine being a place where everyone drinks for free and fedoras hang from tree knots and writers are encouraged to wear the same blazer they bought in 1981, or something like that. Before the gift was delivered, I tried keeping things light around the office, but it wasn’t easy. If I’d established myself as a kind of journalistic charlatan—a book writer trying to wrestle himself into a set of clothes that everyone else wore freely—people had stopped feeling particularly comforted by the newsroom pony because of what was going on with John, but then the pony did something exceptional, at least for a pony.
One afternoon, I was scrolling Twitter during a perfunctory “Yellowknife” search—an instance of print journalism deciding that if you can’t beat digital journalism, you might as well use it—when I came across a freshly posted item from CBC news, reporting that the city’s KFC outlet was closing after fifty years. The words were out of my mouth as soon as I read them: “They’re closing the KFC!” Everybody turned in the chairs: a collective squeaking of wheels. If I hadn’t, technically, broken the story, I’d at least broken it in the Yellowknifer newsroom, making me feel, for a moment, very important, but also useful in having swung the hot lights away from my friend.
Suddenly, all anyone could talk about was KFC. Editors and reporters volleyed questions at me: “When is it closing?” “What’s going on there?” “Is there really no more chicken?” Affecting a veteran cool that I’d done very little to earn, I spun in my chair and crossed my arms behind my head while fielding their inquiries, making up most of my answers before confessing that I had no further insight into the matter. Still, it felt good to be part of the news-making team, a sensation that accelerated once Ellen came over from her station to ask me one of the most affecting questions I’d answer that summer:
“Can you get me a quote?”
“Yes, yes, I can,” I said.
“Go, buddy, go,” said John, goosed, for a moment, to life.
Walking away, Ellen said, “There’s a little bit of newsroom excitement for you, eh, Dave?”
She was right.
The pony was happy.
I asked Shawn for the number of the store’s owner—this presented me with my first problem in the possible construction of a story: was KFC a “store,” a “restaurant,” an “outlet,” or a “chickenshack”? Or was it all of the above?—but before calling, I positioned myself the way John did at his desk: notebook flipped open and a pencil in my teeth waiting to fire a hard question at whomever answered. The phone rang once, twice, a third time. I imagined a group of people huddled in a room discussing what to say and how would they spin this and what if he knows don’t give anything away for christsakes don’t let him know that you know.
Someone picked up.
It was a woman, one of the KFC employees.
“Hello there, this is Dave Bidini from the Yellowknifer,” I said, a ripple of excitement moving through my words.
“Oh,” she said.
“Hi, yes,” I said, pausing to remember John’s approach. “How are you doing today?” delivering my query with, I hoped, the sensitivity and sympathy of someone concerned with her well-being.
“Okay, fine,” she said.
“Can I ask you your name?”
“Winona,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. “Hello Winona. We’ve heard that the KFC plans to close down on August 26. Is that true?”
“Sorry, what?” she said.
“Closing down. The store is closing.”
“Um, hold on,” she said, holding the phone to her chest. She was quiet for a while—I thought I heard the muffle of voices on the other end—and the longer she remained disengaged, the more I felt like a bit of jerk, understanding that jerkdom is one of the qualities needed to be a halfway decent reporter. I couldn’t stop thinking: what if Winona didn’t know about the store’s closing? What if she was hearing this for the first time? What if losing her job meant her family suffering and what if her family suffering led to all those things associated with hard times after the end of an income? What about her kids? What about their future? Winona seemed like a nice person. And there I was, working on my scoop. In this moment, one thing I did not feel like was hard-boiled. Now it was me who was pressing the phone to their chest, worrying about what came next. I thought breaking into tears would ruin whatever reputation I’d fabricated, so I sucked back the emotion. Winona returned to the line.
“Oh, okay, yes, but you have to talk to the boss. He’ll be in later,” she said, sounding almost sunny, which made me wonder if the discussion had gone like this:
—Is it McFadden?
—No.
—Is it that Shawn kid?
—Don’t think so. Sounds too old.
—Is it the Japanese one?
—Who?
—Never mind. It’s not Bryant, is it?
—No, he’s away, I think.
—Okay, must be that new guy. Tell him to call back, which he won’t. We’re fine.
I told Winona I would call back, which I would not. I told Ellen what I had, or didn’t have.
“Did they confirm the closing?”
“They did, sort of. They didn’t unconfirm it.”
“Okay. Write it up,” she ordered.
I started scribbling—if I wasn’t hard-boiled, maybe I was at least deep-fried, with onions and peppers—and after a while, I had the story. I filed and then Ellen asked about a photo. She suggested waiting until they removed the giant chicken bucket, which the store planned to do later in the week.
When the day of the de-bucketing came, John and I stood on the road and watched as a truck winched the candy-striped bucket from its pole, lowering it onto a flatbed with a city worker peeking over the lip like a kid on a teacup ride. We stood in silence, sparing a moment to wonder what it all meant. Was the bucket coming down a metaphor for John’s troubles? Was he the bucket or the dude trapped in the bucket? Did the end of the chicken shack represent the end of old Yellowknife? What would happen to the bucket? What would happen to Winona? Would the communities ever get their chicken again? Would someone buy the bucket and put it on a stick in their backyard? Neither of us had answers. A few more workers tied the bucket down and then the truck drove it away, leaving a hole in the middle of the sky.
“I’ve got your headline,” said John, shading his eyes from the sun.
“PICKING UP A BUCKET OF CHICKEN.”
“Hey, it’s pretty good,” I said.
We stood there for a moment looking at where the bucket used to be.
“Buddy, I tell you, it’s all I’ve fucking got,” he said.
JAYSUS MOY LAG
The dust began to settle post-arrest. News arrived that the paper planned to pay for John’s lawyer and cover whatever legal costs he incurred. “So, that’s nice,” he told me, wringing his hands. “It’ll probably run them six or seven grand, so it’s not cheap,” he said. When I approached the publisher, Mike Scott, and mentioned the costs, he remonstrated: “Of course we’re paying. He’s our writer and our employee.” Bruce Valpy was more blunt: “You can’t go around throwing writers in jail for doing their job. We have to defend that any way we can.” The search began to find a lawyer for John and the paper’s motor ran a little steadier, allowing me time to take my next midsummer trip around the Territories, this time closer to the Arctic Circle, or “next level North,” which is how Randi put it after hearing of my plans to go deeper into the Northwest Territories.
I wanted to go to Tuktoyaktuk because, all my life, it felt like an impossible place I would never have a chance to visit; like Pluto or Patagonia or Keith Richards’ rec room. It was a name, or word, I’d heard spoken in films about the North that teachers had screened in public school classes, and its name stuck like a popcorn kernel in the cavity of my imagination, every hard “k’ ” embedded there, one driven in deeper by the one that followed. If I knew very little about the Northwest Territories—if we, as Southerners, knew very little—we knew even less about the settlement on the far reaches of the northern shoreline at the hem of the Arctic Ocean. And yet here I was, two plane rides and a boat trip away. This was the North, too. Once you made it up here, you were never far from the unreachable.
I reached the top of north via Inuvik, hoping that a series of float plane rides would go better than the last. I was encouraged to find that my immediate vessel—a First Air AIR-42—seemed like any other short-haul carrier, the seat-pouch card with emergency warnings in Dene and Inuktitut notwithstanding. I had the good luck of sitting next to a half-Irish, half-Dene man named Harold Peely, a mining shift worker bound for a two-week run in Norman Wells, the Sahtu’s hub of the natural gas industry. Harold grew up in Cambridge Bay and was the acclaimed throat-singer Tanya Tagaq’s boyfriend when they were fourteen years old. I liked Harold immediately. He was small-featured and whippy, bouncing in his seat when he spoke, and wore a leather jacket with an embroidered Harley’s logo on the back—automobile, racing stripe, dancers with huge torpedoes—that a friend of his had made before dying in prison. He raced snowmobiles, had fought Jordin Tootoo in a northern summer league hockey game, and once partied in Nunavut with the California folk-pop-hippie group, Dr. Hook, of all bands. Harold was also a guide who hunted caribou and bear, but, in the summer, he slugged it out in the mines, something he’d done since he was sixteen years old.
Like Susan Chaffee, Harold immediately made a point of telling me how many people he’d beaten up, all of it with a smile like a burning wick. In a gesture of transparency, he also told me how many people had beaten him up, most recently his wife. “She knocked me out with one punch! Right here, where I’m most vulnerable,” he said, pointing to his temple. I was about to suggest to him that I didn’t think he was the only one who was vulnerable there, but he said, “I know what you’re gonna say. But most people get hit here,” he said, tapping his cheek. “You can hit me here a hundred times and I won’t go down. But I was teaching my wife to box, and bam!, she tagged me in the temple. I was flat out!” he shouted, surging back in his chair. “My wife and I fight all the time,” he confessed. “She’s pretty tough. Still, ten years of marriage. That’s pretty good, eh? Our daughter’s two and our son’s adopted. We took him in because, a while ago, my wife was assaulted pretty bad. She can’t have kids anymore.”
Harold spoke of tragedy like it was just another plot point. No matter how hilarious or mischievous his stories, something terrible always happened in the narrative: his brother was an addict, his parents were alcoholics, and, years ago, he’d lost a son to fatal illness. Pathos wandered through his life like a mourning violinist past a chirruping crowd, but if Harold acknowledged the sadness and the pain, he didn’t dwell on it. If it were me telling one of his stories—say, about confronting a local drug dealer (“From B.C. A real punk”) who’d sold methamphetamines to my teenage son, and I told the dealer that I was going to bury him in a hole in the middle of the ocean where he wouldn’t be found again (“We could do this. Easy,” he said, in case I doubted him)—I might have paused to gauge whether it was appropriate to share a story about the darkest struggles of life. But Harold treated death and sadness with the same weight afforded the wonder of life, not forgetting to be hilarious, which he also was.
I was only overnight in Inuvik, home to the most northern stoplight in Canada as well as the utilidor, a massive and insulated above-ground water tubing system that caterpillars through town. I boarded another plane bound for Deline—the land of the northern prophets—travelling in a Twin Otter with beige single-row seats, beige seat belts, and beige-framed windows patterned against beige walls. As we nosed through the clouds, a northern plaid was revealed—lakeblues, landgreens, and redroads—sitting between tungsten mountains (the Mackenzie range) dotted with forests like a five o’clock shadow. Although I am not the most devoted window-gazer—once, I remember slumbering while flying over Rome, only to awaken at the sight of the Eternal City fired in sunlight below me, and feeling like a doofus for nearly missing it—my forehead was pressed against the warm flat of the window watching as the landscape transformed into a set of enormous moth’s wings: great circles of red, grey, green, auburn, and brown, scabbed at the edges like a melanoma. The ground looked soupy and damp—stomping Yetis would have been swallowed whole by the mud, I thought—which, I learned, was the result of permafrost warmed by the sun, melting the colours into great sets of watery eyes. There was a retarded summer beauty about the land—exactly the kind of North I’d hoped to discover: neither monochromatic nor endlessly barren—and you could see the terrestrial fight being waged between the seasons, one emerging while another refused to pass.
