Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe

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СКАЧАТЬ file. Quarter past ten Katherine came in. She shed her soaked peacoat, hung her umbrella on the balcony rail, and said, “Don’t ever ask me to do that again.”

      “She appreciated it. And you said you liked animals.”

      “The front ends of animals, Mike. The cute, cuddly ends.”

      “Least in this job, unlike, say, government service, your exposure to assholes is brief and irregular, pardon the pun.”

      She looked at the overturned crate and the papers on the table. She noticed the Loeb file on her chair. “Should I file this?”

      “No, it’s important it stays out.”

      “Where?”

      “I don’t know. We’ll move it when we get back. Did your boyfriend lend you the van?”

      “His mother’s minivan,” she said. “With express instructions it’s back by noon.”

      “We won’t be any longer than that.”

      “Damn right we won’t.”

      “But we do have some stops to make,” I said.

      I love Staples. It’s an irrational love, but genuine. Only book stores and the Army & Navy inspire the same level of ardour. I love the ten-dollar packages of parchment and the locked display case of ballpoint pen refills. I love the bins of cheapjack school supplies, dollar-ninety-nine plastic hole punches, thirty-nine-cent cahiers. I love the row of overpriced lockboxes and safes and the solitary Brother typewriter in the last aisle next to the ribbons and correcting tape. Every item in the store seems both necessary and frivolous, and the store itself seems aware of this paradox. The cashiers will find any justification you come up with entirely reasonable, even if you yourself don’t believe your business really requires a tri-coloured stamp set that says Welcome! in eight languages.

      By the time we’d circumnavigated the store I’d bought a stack of folding chairs, two stainless steel filing cabinets, and a year’s supply of alligator clips and legal pads. Katherine had added an ergonomic keyboard and a CO2-powered dust remover. She circled back through the furniture section to re-examine a pleather-covered office chair.

      “Look,” she said, using the lever to raise herself incrementally and then with one depression sink till her knees were above her waist. “We should get a matching pair.”

      “Not me. I need four legs and wood so I can tip it back against the wall.”

      “You could get hurt doing that.”

      “I live on the edge, Hough.”

      She grinned. “Well, I’m getting one. And a ridged plastic office mat to go underneath it.”

      “Oh, you have to get the mat.”

      “It’s more of an investment then an accessory, really.”

      “Have to spend money to make money.”

      After doling out my debit card to the cashier, we ran through the rain, pushing our purchases down to where we’d parked. We folded down the van’s seats and squeezed everything into the back, abandoning the shopping carts on the curb.

      As Katherine inched out of the parking spot, I said, “How many government jobs let you pick your furniture?”

      “You know,” she said, “there are always going to be other students looking for part-time work.”

      “It took a long time for me to get used to your many shortcomings. I don’t want to go through that every year.”

      “What you mean to say is, it’s hard to find someone gullible enough to administer a suppository to your dog.”

      “Is that what I mean?” The dashboard clock read 11:40. I brought out Django’s itinerary and gave Katherine directions to Enola Curious Studios.

      “We’ll be quick,” I promised.

      The studio was on the third floor of a yellow building just off Broadway and Quebec. Katherine parked beneath an overhanging maple tree behind the property, her boyfriend’s mother’s silver Odyssey slotting between a beige Vanagon and a custard-coloured Mustang.

      The studio’s double-door back entrance was locked. We walked around and caught the front door as a skinny beret-wearing kid was exiting. He looked grateful for the help as he maneuvered his upright bass through the doorway.

      On the landing, three forty-year-olds in punk regalia were passing around a joint. Two of them leered at Katherine. The third leered at me. Only as we reached the last flight could I hear soft music from inside. As I opened the hallway door the music got louder, and by the time we were standing at the studio entrance I recognized the song as a thrash-metal cover of “The Way You Look Tonight.”

      “Get it? Because it’s ironic,” I said to Katherine as I knocked on the door.

      The music cut off. I knocked again. Bare feet padded across the carpet. The door opened and a woman ushered us in. Before I could ask if she was Amelia Yates or Yeats she had disappeared through a glass-paned door at the end of the hall.

      On the left side of the hallway was a live room with a piano in the corner, patch-cords snaked across the floor, and a drum kit in the centre surrounded by a forest of microphones on boom stands. The walls were covered with ribbed foam. Movable baffles had been set up around the kit. The right side of the hall led to smaller rooms: a storage closet containing, among other things, a Fender Rhodes and a sitar, two isolation booths with ancient-looking Koss headphones hanging off music stands, and a break room with a pink-upholstered couch.

      “Must be worth a fortune,” Katherine said.

      From the glass room the music blasted out, stopped, blasted out, stopped.

      I opened the door to the central booth. The woman was facing away from us, staring at a pair of computer monitors each bigger than my grandmother’s television. Her crescent-shaped mahogany desk was flanked by speakers, no doubt positioned equidistant from her ears. A half-finished bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper with a pink straw stuffed inside sat next to the office chair.

      “Miss Yates?” I said.

      “Just a sec, just a sec.” She manipulated a wave form on one of the screens, pulled down a menu on the other. She held up her hand, gesturing for us to wait.

      The walls were decorated with framed photos, a gold record, a letter of nomination from the Juno Awards, an official thank-you from some fundraiser. I was looking for clarification on the Yates-Yeats question, but the documents were evenly split. I picked out faces in the photos. The crème de la crème of Canadian music superstardom: the bald guy from the Tragically Hip, Randy Bachman’s brother, one of the bald guys from the Barenaked Ladies, Dan Ackroyd in his Elwood Blues get-up, Randy Bachman’s son, Colin James, Avril Lavigne, the bald guy from Hard Core Logo, and Randy Bachman. And on the door, a very nice signed photo of a young Amelia Yates or Yeats in between the Wilson sisters from Heart.

      “Look,” Katherine whispered, nudging me no doubt to inspect one of the photos. Instead she pointed to Yeats’s chair. “Same as the one I just bought.”

      “Then СКАЧАТЬ