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.”