Deluded Your Sailors Read Online Free

secretaries had typed and answered phones and crossed their legs behind desk modesty panels. Now the floor housed the much-expanded department’s workforce – the gaffers, as Jackman called them. Behind closed doors, other Assistant Deputy Ministers just used the words ‘cattle’ and ‘stalls.’ Evan, a seasonally-seconded temp, had been lucky to get a cubicle. A few committee heads and the Assistant Deputy Ministers, those happy few, worked in tiny Venetian-blinded offices lining the east wall, scheming and competing to stand ready when the Minister called one of them up to fill the empty role of Deputy Minister. They kept their office doors closed. The Minister himself rarely graced the department, but two executive assistants regularly dusted and vacuumed his cavernous office. Much as Evan disliked swelling Jackman’s head still further, he must agree: in Tourism, Culture and Recreation, at least, the Assistant Deputy Ministers did most of the work.
    Evan followed his memory-thread to his cubicle. Faux St John’s street signs marked the pathways: St Clare, Water, Elizabeth, Duckworth, Harbourside, Beck’s Cove, Clift’s-Baird’s Cove, LeMarchant, even George. The little corridors intersected like the handwritten sentences from 1745. Not corridors, truth told, nor pathways. Most people called them lanes, despite Chris Jackman’s several memos instructing staff to refer to the paths as drungs . If the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation of the Republic of Newfoundland and Labrador does not use authentic Newfoundland English, then who will? We here at government cannot allow Newfoundland English to go on state-sanctioned life-support the way that Irish Gaelic did. Evan had chuckled when first reading the memo and almost shared his thoughts with Jackman, but then the pathologically busy ADM would likely take Evan’s sauce for a rallying cry: What once they spoke we speak?
    Evan’s cubicle, three desks left of the intersection of Harvey and LeMarchant, housed a small desk, one antiquated laptop, a refurbished olive green rotary dial telephone, one framed photo of himself in eighteenth-century Royal Newfoundland Regiment uniform and bearskin hat doing the grip-and-grin with the PM, and one wobbly four-caster chair stained with beige splashes.
    Evan had just planted his arse in said wobbly chair when Chris Jackman Kilroyed over the facing cubicle wall. —Any mummers lowed in? Piss yourself, Rideout?
    â€”Coffee, potholes and winter. Deadly combination. When are you gonna get that stretch of highway paved?
    â€”Not my department. Potholes are worse than moose, some days. Get anythin from Mrs O’Dea we could turn into dinner theatre for the tourists? You’re hidin somethin from me.
    Lying, Evan said no. Once last year he’d joined a poker game with Jackman, justifiably confident he’d win a little. He planned to hold back, truth told, so he wouldn’t piss Jackman off. But Chris Jackman, one of those men gifted with calculation and frightening sight, murdered the lot of them. Since that costly night, Evan had worked to better hide his thoughts from Jackman. Another X for failure on the calendar today.
    Chris Jackman’s thinning fair hair wisped up dead straight as he ducked out of sight. Evan sighed, turned round in his chair and faced the cubicle entrance. Jackman leapt into the cubicle, too joyful to care that Evan had anticipated him. —I know that face, Rideout. Either you’re after givin birth to a turd thick as your fist, or you found somethin really good out there.
    â€”I just want to authenticate – gimme that Jesus briefcase!
    â€”Ah-ah-ah, don’t you talk to your boss like that.
    â€”Jackman, put on these cotton gloves first, will ya? The oils from your fingers can damage the papers.
    â€”Oil? Don’t be talkin. I got some writer tryna pin me down for an interview about Sea Sentry . That rig went down