Читать книгу Godblog - Laurie Channer - Страница 13

The November schedule was posted. As usual, Mohammed couldn’t keep up with the shift preferences of the staff, so as usual, Dag was immediately the most popular guy in the store. Being behind the counter working with him, Heathen got the unspoken first crack. But there was Ginette, off-duty, but hanging right at the end of the bar, lurking like a vulture, waiting her turn.

“Hey, Dag, I have an aerials clinic on November fifteenth,” Heathen said. “Can you swap shifts?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, so I’ll—what?” Heathen did a double-take. “Did you say ‘No’?” Dag never said no. Everybody counted on that.

“I would if I was going to be here,” he said matter-of-factly, “but by then, I expect to be moved down to Vancouver.”

Heathen gaped at him. “What! To do what?”

“This,” he said, bending close and scrubbing at a blob of dried-on chocolate syrup.

“What ‘this’?”

“This this.” He straightened up and made a sweeping gesture with his rag. “BlackArts. The java jive.”

Heathen was perplexed. “Did they transfer you or something?”

“I asked to be transferred.”

“How do you know there’ll be a job for you?”

He laughed. “Heathen, this is BlackArts. You know what the turnover’s like, even here. And there’s one every two blocks in Vancouver. One of them’s going to need somebody.”

“Yeah, but why do you need to go there? If you’re just going to pour lattes, why the hell would anyone in their right mind do it in a big ugly city when they could be doing it in the mountains and fresh air?”

“I’ve been to Vancouver. It’s not ugly.”

“It’s uglier than here.”

“It’s a nice city,” he said.

“All your friends are here.”

This time he looked up, with an expression she couldn’t quite figure out. “Heathen, you’re ‘all my friends’, and you’re crabby at me for god-knows-what half the time. You want to stay in touch, we’ll stay in touch. And it’s only two hours away. You’ll come through on the way to and from the airport for your out-of-town meets. But you probably won’t.”

God, he was serious. “Did I do something to piss you off?” she asked. She knew it would be the shift supervisor thing.

“Let’s not talk about it here, okay?”

Well, there it was. Heathen spent the rest of the shift feeling like shit for having gotten up his nose from time to time. But he had to know he was her best work bud, the first one she went to with all her ski news and results, and if he couldn’t see that, then screw him. She was sure she paid her share of rounds when they went for beers. Maybe she asked him to take a few of her shifts once in a while, but he got extra cash out of that. He had no right to make her feel bad. By the end of the afternoon, Heathen’s mopey mood had turned quite resentful. So resentful, she turned down his invite to go have a beer on the patio at Shredder Steve’s when they did the handover to the early evening crew.

“Heathen, you’ve been slamming cups around all afternoon. Stop being a bitch and come for a damn drink already,” he said.

“Gee,” she said, “I don’t know how I can turn down an invitation like that.” She turned back to counting the coins out of the tip jar. A second later, without warning, she was grabbed from behind. She shrieked and coins went flying as she was grabbed around the legs and turned upside down.

“Take care of those for us, would you, Mo?” Dag’s voice came from somewhere out of her view. “I’m taking Heathen for a beer.” He had her knees over his shoulder, the rest of her hanging down his back. “Somebody hand me her purse from the cupboard. See ya later.”

“Jesus Christ, Dag!” Heathen kicked and struggled. Customers were laughing as he pushed the door open and strode outside. “You’re going to drop me on my head.”

“No, I won’t,” he said.

“Put me down!”

“If I do, will you come quietly?”

“NO!”

“Then you’re coming like this. And quit fussing. You do aerials, you should be used to being upside-down.” She could hear him greeting people pleasantly as she bobbed along, still wriggling. “Hi, how’ya doin’? Nice day. Welcome to Whistler.” Her apron was flapping down over her face, but when the breeze puffed it away, she could see them from her upside-down perspective, turning to stare and laugh. “She does freestyle,” he said to someone. “This is training.”

“Stop! You can’t do this to me!”

“Apparently I can,” he said. And he was right. He was strong. She was got but good and had to bear it, protesting embarrassedly half the length of the village complex down to Steve’s, until he arrived at the patio. “I’ll have a Corona,” she heard him say. He reached back with his free hand and poked her ribs. “What do you want?”

“Don’t poke me!”

“Kokanee it is. Steve, Heathen will have a Kokanee.” He finally bent over to plunk her into a chair and plopped into another opposite, grinning at her.

“For god’s sake, Heathen,” he said, “take your apron off. You look ridiculous.”

Heathen finger-combed her hair, looking around furtively to see how many of her friends she’d been mortified in front of. ‘All of them’ seemed to be the correct answer. “You bastard.”

“This isn’t about you, Heathen. Not everything is.”

Their beers arrived quicker than usual. Two bottles each. “That’s for the floor show,” Steve said.

Heathen could feel her face turning as red as when the blood had rushed to her head upside down. “You are so dead, Java Man,” she said to Dag.

He pointed to her beer. “You drink, I’ll talk,” he said firmly. “You don’t get to say a word till half that beer is gone, or you’re going home the same way you came in.”

Heathen drank.

“I’m going to move away from here,” he said, looking very seriously straight into her eyes, “because I need to. There’s two reasons. One, it’s hard for me to hang around here with the mountains in my face, when I can’t do what I came here to do.”

Oh, the tragedy of his lost snowboarding career. The mountains rose up in a fantastic vista behind his head. “If you’d just get out and practice—” Heathen started.

He jabbed a finger at her. “Keep drinking,” he ordered.

Heathen tipped up her beer again guiltily.

“The other reason,” Dag said, “is there are more people down there. I want to see more kinds of people. I see tourists here, I can see tourists there. But I can also see working stiffs and housewives with strollers and students and people who can’t afford to come to Whistler. Real teeming masses with other concerns than the snow conditions. Do you get that?” he said.

“Oh, come on,” Heathen said. “Teeming masses? Is this about the blog? I can’t believe you want to move from here for an Internet thing.”

His look hardened. “Okay, fuck it,” he said and got up to go. “Enjoy your beer. See you at work.”

“Hey, wait!” she said, grabbing at his arm. “Wait. Is this, like, serious?”

“What do you care?” he said, still on his feet. “You don’t even think it’s me.”

“It’s just weird to think it’s you,” Heathen said honestly. “There’s some not very nice stuff in that blog. It makes me look at you differently when you’re this super-nice guy at work.”

He sighed. “Then it’ll probably be easier for you when I’m gone.”

“Shit, Dag,” Heathen said, “don’t you think I’m going to miss you?”

He squinted, the lowering sun in his eyes. “Suckup,” he finally said, taking his seat again. “You’re just angling for me to carry you home.”

• • •

Somebody practically did carry her home, later, but right side up, after several other people joined them, and they drank until the wee hours. It was her first time doing so in months, since she’d committed herself to making nationals, and she regretted it for two reasons. One, she was in bad shape for practice the next day and two, by her best recollection, Dag had faded out of the picture kind of early, while she partied on with her ski buds. That kind of made her feel bad again. Though it wasn’t her shift, she went into the shop the next day after training, sure she would find him, with a peace offering.

“I’ve got a niece in Vancouver,” Heathen followed him around as he bussed tables after the lunch hour rush. “First year at UBC. She could maybe give you crash space for a little bit.”

“You have a niece old enough to be at UBC?”

“Yeah, you know my brothers are way older than me.”

“What’s your niece like?”

“This kid is incredible,” Heathen said. “She’s sweet, had a ninety-eight average at graduation, did student council, volunteer work, speaks fluent French, and, and, and.”

“So, totally unlike you,” Dag said.

Heathen didn’t even bite at that. “If she isn’t running the World Bank or achieving world peace in about five years, it’ll be a big shock. But,” she added, “I already asked if she could put up with a slacker, stoner, ex-snowboarding coffee slinger for a week or two until you get yourself sorted out. She’s so nice, she said yes.”

“As long as I don’t get any underachiever cooties on her,” Dag said.

“Well, you can’t make a lot of noise to keep her from studying,” Heathen said.

“Thanks, but I think I’ll find something else...” his voice trailed off as he picked up a newspaper that had been left on a table.

He suddenly sat down hard at the table among the dirty cups, bussing forgotten.

“Hey,” Ashley said from the cash, “you better not be slacking off over there. I need my break.”

Dag ignored her. He looked stupefied. He pointed wordlessly at an article, in the bottom corner of the local news page. Heathen leaned over to read it.

It was two and a half column inches that read:

MAN WARNED OF FRAUD BY STRANGERS’ E-MAILS

A Vancouver man was alerted to fraud by his boss when he received e-mails from complete strangers—ninety-seven of them. Paramjeet Singh, 47, a comptroller at the Surrey Society, a charitable organization, received the massive influx of e-mails at his desk first thing Monday morning. Arriving with various headers he initially mistook for internet “spam”, they all carried the same message: that his boss, Executive Director Leon Varty, was about to embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars of the charity’s money and leave documents framing Singh for the theft. There was no apparent connection between any of the senders, none of whom were known to Singh, nor an indication of how any of them obtained the information. Singh was sufficiently concerned to alert authorities, and Varty, 54, was apprehended in his office with cashier’s checks for $234,000, his passport, and two plane tickets to Fiji in his briefcase. Charges are pending.

“So?” she said.

His voice came out in a whisper. “This,” he said. “I did this.”

“You sent one of the e-mails?” Heathen said. “Cool.”

“No,” Dag shook his head. “I heard this man talking to a woman over there the other day—” he pointed to the corner table. “It must have been this Varty guy. Something about leaving Paramjeet holding the bag. And the lady said he wouldn’t know what hit him.”

“Oh, that was the thing in the Heroblog a few days ago!” Heathen said. “So you figure you saved this charity a couple of hundred grand?”

“What I’m saying,” Dag said, “is that I think these ninety-seven people read my blog. Only about thirty people showed up at the store for the food drive.”

“Not ninety-seven readers,” Heathen said.

“No?” He looked relieved.

“No,” she said. “Only ninety-seven who were sufficiently inspired or challenged to go to the trouble to try and locate one particular Singh among the huge number in the greater Vancouver area.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s like they say around here,” Heathen said. “For every one person who writes on the comment cards, there’s probably ten more who thought the same thing, but didn’t take the trouble.”

“You mean almost a thousand people read my blog?” He was starting to look panicky. “Heathen!” Dag’s voice went just about ultrasonic on the last syllable. “Don’t tell me that a thousand people are reading my blog! Do not tell me that!”

“Well, isn’t that what it’s up there for? To be read?”

“No! I don’t know! It’s just there!”

She gave him her patented “what-kind-of-a-goof-are-you?” look. “What did you think would happen?”

“There’s tons better things to look at on the web than me,” Dag protested. “For fuck’s sake, there’s porn! My blog isn’t even registered with Google.”

“Everything’s Googleable,” she said.

“The Hero isn’t trying to be found.”

“Dag, you can’t hide on the web. It’s www. The first two stand for world wide. Even Google will sniff you out eventually. Come on.” She grabbed his arm and hauled him up from the table. He felt like dead weight. “Ashley, I’m borrowing Dag for a minute,” she called back over her shoulder.

In seconds, she’d dragged him into Kaz’s internet access joint two storefronts over and plunked him in front of a terminal.

She googled “Hero of the Teeming Masses” over his shoulder. The search took 0.37 seconds. “See,” she said, pointing to the top return. “It’s found you. But look, other people have mentioned it on their sites, too. How many e-mails did that guy get?” She grabbed the paper that was still gripped in his hand. “Nearly a hundred. Okay, so it looks like the ratio is about one in fifty that wrote.”

Dag didn’t answer. He was staring wordlessly again, his finger on the screen at the line that said: Results 1 - 10 of about 14,700.

• • •

Memo to: Zone Offices District Managers, Human Resources Managers

From: Chief Administration Officer, Seattle HQ

CC: Deputy General Counsel

Re: “The Hero of the Teeming Masses”

________________________________________________

Zone Offices are asked to continue efforts to identify the originator of the weblog www.heroblog.rawblawgs.com. This individual’s previous disparaging (though, according to Legal, not libelous) comment(s) indicate discontent with BlackArts. There is also indication in the entries that BlackArts employees eavesdrop on private customer conversations and business, an image we do not want to foster. HR Managers are instructed to perform field visits to all retail outlets in their districts and undertake interviews with all employees to determine if the author of this weblog is in fact on staff, and to assess any level of discontent that this individual may be attempting to spread among other staffers. As the United States Postal Service has learned all too well, discontented employees may be a danger to themselves and others.

Written reports are requested in three weeks’ time.

Principle Number Two in the BlackArts Mission Statement: Welcome each other’s differences and encourage them in our business models.

• • •

The Hero sayeth: Got a significant other you want to ditch and haven’t the guts/heart/balls to have the difficult conversation? The Hero can help. Follow these simple steps.

1. Go forth and get thyself a permanent marker.

2. When unwanted other is asleep, draw dotted lines around the offending party’s wrists, ankles, waist, neck. Especially neck.

3. When the above body art is discovered, no conversation will be needed.