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Zeb laughs. "You have an amazing ass too," he says. "Not floppy, though. Compact."
"Tell about Chuck," says Toby.
Chuck entered Bearlift Central as though tiptoeing into a forbidden room while pretending he had a right to be there. Furti
ve but assertive. To Zeb's mind, his clothes were too new. They looked as if Chuck had just come from one of those crispy outfitter shops, zippers and Velcro and flaps all over, like some kind of kinky video puzzle game. Undo this man, find the leprechaun, win a prize. Never trust a man with new clothes.
"But clothes have to be new sometimes," says Toby. "Or they did back then. They weren't created old."
"Real men know how to dirty up their clothes in about one second," says Zeb. "They writhe around in mud. Apart from the clothes, his teeth were too big and white. When I see those kinds of teeth, I always want to give them a gentle tap with a bottle. See if they're fake, watch them shatter. My dad, the Rev, had teeth like that. He used whitener on them. The teeth plus his tan made him look like some kind of light-up deep-sea devilfish or else a long-dead horse's head in a desert. It was worse when he smiled than when he didn't."
"Back off on the childhood," says Toby. "You'll get woeful."
"Woe, your foe? Say no to woe? Don't preach at me, babe."
"It works for me. Backing off woe."
"You sure about that?"
"So, Chuck."
"So. There was something about his eyes. Chuck's eyes. Laminated eyes. Hard and shiny. They had a sort of transparent lid over them."
The first time Chuck appeared at the canteen table with his tray and said, "Mind if I join you?" he scanned Zeb, an overall back-and-forth of those laminated eyes. Like scanning a barcode.
Zeb glanced up at him. He didn't say yes, he didn't say no. He gave an all-purpose grunt and continued work on his rubbery conundrum of a sausage. You'd have expected Chuck to start with personal questions - where you from, how'd you get here, and so forth - but he didn't. His opening ploy was Bearlift. He said what a great org it was, but since that got no nodding and yupping from Zeb, he intimated that he was only there because he'd hit a bad patch in his life and was, you know, keeping quiet for a while, until things blew over.
"What'd you do, pick your nose?" said Zeb, and Chuck gave a dead-horse-teeth laugh. He said that he guessed Bearlift was for guys who, you know, sort of like the Foreign Legion, and Zeb said the foreign what, and that was the end of that one.
Not that he could shake the guy by being rude. Chuck backed off, but he still managed to be ever-present. Zeb would be at the bar labouring away at the next morning's hangover and all of a sudden there would be Chuck, buddying up, offering to get the next round. Go to the can, take a leak, and there would be Chuck, materializing like ectoplasm, taking a leak two stalls down; or Zeb would be sliding round the corner in the seedier part of Whitehorse and, guess what, Chuck would be sliding round the next corner over. He most likely went through Zeb's stuff in Zeb's broom closet of a room when Zeb wasn't in it.
"He was welcome to it," says Zeb. "Nothing in my dirty laundry but dirty laundry because the real dirty laundry was in my head."
But what was his game? Because it was obvious he had one. At first Zeb thought Chuck was gay and was about to start some trouser nuzzling, but it wasn't that.
Over the next few weeks Chuck and Zeb had flown a couple of lifts together. There were always two in a Pufferfish; you'd take turns dozing. Zeb tried to avoid partnering with Chuck, who by this time was giving him the nape prickles, but on the first occasion the guy Zeb was supposed to have flown with was called away by an aunt's funeral and Chuck had inserted himself into the slot, and the second time the other guy got food poisoning. Zeb wondered if Chuck had paid the two of them off to go missing. Or strangled the aunt, or put E. coli in the pizza, to make it convincing.
He waited for Chuck to pop the question while they were in midair. Maybe he knew about some of Zeb's earlier capers and was hiring for a hitherto-unknown bunch of darksiders who wanted Zeb to tackle a bolus of seriously forbidden hackery; or maybe it was an extortion outfit after some plutocrat, or a hireling connected with IP thieves who needed a skein of professional trackwork to further their kidnapping of a Corp brainiac.
Or maybe it was a sting - Chuck would propose some flagrantly illegal jest, record Zeb agreeing to do it, and then the giant lobster claws of what passed for the justice system would descend and clench; or maybe there'd be some goofy blackmail demand, as if you could get shit from a stone.
But nothing abnormal happened on these two runs. They must've been soothers, to set Zeb at ease. Signal that Chuck was harmless. Was his dinkiness a deep cover?
It almost worked. Zeb started thinking he himself was paranoid. Twitching at shadows. Worrying about a slithery nobody like Chuck.
That morning - the morning of the crash - had started out as usual. Breakfast, some anonymous bunwich with mysterious ingredients, couple of mugs of caffeine substitute, slice of toasted sawdust. Bearlift got its supplies on the cheap: It considered its cause to be so noble and worthy you were supposed to be humble, eat food stand-ins, save the good stuff for the bears.
Then loading up the offal, biodegradable sacks of it forklifted into the belly of the Puffer. Zeb's scheduled flying partner had been scratched off that day's list - cut his foot dancing barefoot on broken glass to show how tough he was in one of the local knocking shops while higher than the ionosphere on some cretinous pharmaceutical, it was said - and Zeb was supposed to be doubling with an okay guy called Rodge. But when he went to get in, there was Chuck, all togged up with his crispy zippers and Velcro flaps, smiling with his enormous white horse teeth but not with his laminated eyes.
"Rodge get a phone call?" said Zeb. "Grandmother died?"
"Father, in fact," said Chuck. "Nice day. Hey, I brought you a beer." He had one for himself too, just to show he was a regular guy.
Zeb grunted, took the beer, twisted off the top. "Need to take a leak," he said. In the can he poured the beer down the hole. Top seemed to be sealed on, but you could fake those things, you could fake just about anything. He didn't want to swill or munch any item that had been in Chuck's hands.
The Puffers were always complex while taking off: the helicopter blades and the helium/hydrogen blimp provided lift, but the trick was to get high enough before you started the wings flapping, and to cut the heli-blades at exactly the right time, or the whole thing could tip and spiral.
But there was no problem that day. The flight was standard, threading the valleys through and around the Pelly Mountains, pausing to bombard the landscape a few times with bear yummies; then over to the high-altitude Barrens with the Mackenzies all around, postcard snow on the tops, with a couple more drops; then crossing the remains of the Old Canol Trail, still marked by the occasional World War Two telephone pole.
