Write me a Letter

another, just in case. But I did very much want a few words with Willing Boy. So when the nitwit unglued herself from him long enough to take herself to the john, I fell into casual conversation with him by some simple ruse. It turned out he could parlez-vous Frangais after all, which was lucky for him. Not that I had been in any way suspicious, mind you. Also, it turned out not only did he have a mother, but an elder sister married and living in Raleigh, North Carolina; he even produced pictures of them. Both were the exact physical opposite of him, being short, dark, dumpish, bespectacled, and unbeautiful. Some guys have all the luck. You know what he told me his sister wanted on her tombstone? ”Scratch and sniff.” I said I wanted ”That’s all, folks” on mine. Sara, typically, came up with ‘All are creative, few are artists” for hers, then looked at me challengingly.
    ”Très poetical,” I said. ”Who said it?”
    ”Dunno,” she said. ”I heard it somewhere.”
    ”Probably at a Sex Pistols’ concert,” I said. Willing Boy grinned.
    After we landed, we passed an hour and twenty minutes doing what grown-ups who are waiting in airports for connector flights do—listen to babies crying and smile with false sympathy at irate travelers whose outgoing flights are six hours late so far.
    Part of that time I spent at an Air Canada check-in counter, where a man with a ferocious cold stopped sneezing long enough to print out our tickets. Mine was in the name of Holmes; most amusing, Sara. Hers and Willing Boy’s were in the names of Mr. and Mrs. E. B. Browning; again, highly funny. I asked Willing Boy if we should change some money, he said, no sweat, we could do it tomorrow, most cabbies and hotels and the like in Montreal were delighted to accept U.S. currency as they murdered you with the exchange rate. I said what else was new.
    The flight northward, ever northward, to the land of the midnight sun, was exactly the same as the L.A. - New York one, but shorter, of course, and half in French. Georgie Pie didn’t have to translate because the broadcaster did it himself immediately after the French version. Gee... there I was on my way to yet another foreign country—along with Mexico and Houston , that would make it three in four years. Who was the madcap gadabout all of a sudden? I wondered if my upcoming adventures with the world’s most beautiful woman would involve travel to foreign climes. Estonia in April—a catchy phrase, no doubt, but one that does perhaps lack the Garlic charm of the original. Likewise April in Hitler’s bunker or April by the Dead Sea .
    Merde, Montreal was looking better every minute.

9

    La ville de Montréal has an old international airport, Dorval , and a new international airport, Mirabel. As Dorval was conveniently close to Montreal and fairly easy to get to, say a half-hour’s drive, the feds, over the local government’s dead bodies, decided to build the new one out in the middle of the prairies in southern Alberta, thus delighting such worthy citizens as cab drivers, bus operators, Admunson of the Pole, and Avis employees, but infuriating everyone else.
    Or so I was told by my seatmate, a grizzled, mustachioed, red-faced Canuck, on the Air Canada flight north. His name was Chuck something and he hired out to smaller construction companies those huge cement mixers that creep along highways blocking the whole road in front of you making cement as they go. Then he wanted to know if I was interested in making a fortune.
    ”If,” I said, ”you are suggesting a small game of chance to wile away the time, and you just happen to have a deck of pasteboards with you, can I save us both a lot of time and energy that could be better spent drinking this good beer of yours and just hand over all the money I got in the world right now?”
    Chuck roared.
    ” Tabernac! ” he said, I think. ”Nothing like that, eh? See, with cement, once in a while a whole load seizes up on you, like it goes hard as a rock, no one knows why, and you can imagine what a bitch it is afterward dealing with it, eh?”
    ”I sure can,” I said.
    ”So all you got to do is invent a cement that doesn’t seize up.”
    ”Can I have until Friday?” I said. ”I have a couple of simple tasks to perform first, like mush to the Pole and discover oil.”
    He laughed again and shouted at the stewardess for four more beers, paying for them with, among other assorted currency, a pink two-dollar bill