When Is a Man Read Online Free Page B

again.
    The next two fish already had tags in them, yellow ones, the numbers buried under a slick of green algae. “The yellows came up two years ago, you’ll see lots of those. Any red tags, that’s last autumn. Always amazes me, the ones that make it consecutive years. You’d think they’d take time off. It’s a hell of a trip.”

    Inside the camper, they had stuffed Paul’s gear into the overhead fibreglass cabinets and stacked canned goods, toolboxes, and batteries in the storage space under the seats. They wiped down the counters and the inside of the bar fridge, and then piled blankets and sheets on the sofa bed at the front of the camper beside the closet. The table at the back of the trailer could be collapsed into a single bed when the night’s work was done. The upholstered white walls behind the gas stove and countertop, the thin beige drapes, the narrow windows—it would be like living in an egg.
    They sat at the table and transferred data from the waterproof paper onto a spreadsheet on Tanner’s laptop, while outside the generator rumbled and stuttered. Tanner poured a glass of scotch, and Paul sipped herbal tea, a blend that had the unfortunate slight taste of cloves. The whole process had taken them just over an hour.
    â€œIt’ll get busier,” Tanner said. “In a few weeks, the run will hit its peak. Just enough so you won’t get bored. You’ll work for three, maybe four hours straight, not including the data.”
    â€œHope I’m faster by then.”
    â€œYou’ll get there,” Tanner said. “I noticed your laptop—you have your own stuff to do?”
    â€œI don’t, really.”
    â€œThought you might be picking away at your dissertation.”
    Paul traced his finger along the edge of his cup. “Not anymore.”
    â€œNo more parkour?”
    The trailer had an ugly fluorescent light that made Paul’s arm look jaundiced and stick-thin. He flexed his bicep and made a wry face.
    â€œYou should go back to Sweden.” Tanner laughed. “I love it—chasing Vikings and bog mummies.”
    Paul wanted a drink, a nice beer, so he could pretend this was like old times, yakking it up in the campus pub. Nobody said booze was out of the question, but it somehow made sense to deny himself the pleasure of alcohol’s comforting lassitude. Less likely to pee himself too. “When I got back,” he said, “I tried to salvage my research, tried to stay interested . . .”
    Tanner nodded. “So you’re done, then? In the department?”
    Paul shrugged. “I told Dr. Tamba about this job. He said, ‘Since you’re near Castlegar or Grand Forks, why not do something on the Doukhobors?’”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œI said, ‘I’m not in Castlegar. Or Grand Forks.’ Anyways, he was being facetious. He thinks I just grab ideas from thin air.”
    â€œWell, don’t you?” Tanner asked and shot back the rest of his drink. “Like the parkour?”
    â€œMaybe the parkour,” he admitted. “All right, maybe every ethnography I’ve done. It’s great fun, it really is, finding out what makes these groups tick, what sustains them. I mean, what kind of grown man would belong to a parkour club for five years? But it’s true I’ve never found something I could really latch on to, not the way you have with bull trout. I want to keep going. Somehow.” He was an academic, he’d lived so long on research grants and university money he couldn’t imagine another way of getting by.
    Tanner was staring at his empty glass. He suddenly laughed—a vulgar growl. “Fucking bloated . Like a grey balloon.”
    â€œLet’s not.”
    â€œYou have to wonder.”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œWho it was, I mean.” Tanner poured another drink. “They ushered us out pretty quick after the corpse hit