Free Pig: A Thriller by Darvin Babiuk Page A

us who is in charge, lacking even the subtlety to soften the blow. What else would you call the final insult, the gift of a gold watch. Yes, time knows it can never release us. If it did, we might evolve beyond fear of physical violence to reasoned thought, and from reasoned thought to enlightened intuitiveness. Then we would have no use for time, or any of its fascist cousins.
     

     
    At six forty five, Snow was in the Mess Hall drinking coffee, exhausted first thing in the morning, trying to jump-start his head and negate some of the effects of the vodka. Lately, he’d found he was having a hard time getting drunk; he could drink and drink and not feel any of the pleasant mood-altering effects, just all the physical complaints the next day. He nodded to some roughnecks at the table next to him. They didn’t know each other names. That was the way Snow wanted it. He didn’t want to know their names or anything else about them. He felt comfortable there in his cocoon.
    It took him five minutes to walk the few hundred meters to his workplace. Pig had tried to give him a pickup for transportation around the camp the same time he’d made Snow take the phone. Snow had refused. He didn’t want to accept the responsibility of keeping it filled with gas and under repair. Right now, he had two keys on his key chain, one for the office and one for his porta-cabin. That was two keys too many in his opinion. Kolya religiously locked the door every night to protect his precious documents, so Snow had to keep that key ready. The one for his porta-cabin was dull from disuse, since the door was never locked.
    At seven a.m. precisely he was at his station in Document Control, obediently playing his small role in the epic battle of chasing and turning decayed and pressurized mastodons into liquid hydrocarbons. Time would have been proud of him.
     

     
    It had taken some time for Snow to find his current position working at Document Control in Noyabrsk. For Snow, it was the perfect job. He’d tried staying and working the ranch in Cowley, but it wasn’t the same after Jillian had her skull split open. Forced to carry on with consciousness when all he wanted to do was throw the off switch and fade to black, Snow’s head didn’t feel right unless he was sleeping or drunk. He couldn’t look at the coulees or a quarter-horse or a cougar sunning on the rocks by the Castle River without being reminded of her. He’d tried the rodeo circuit, but he wasn’t nearly good enough to make a career out of it. He had worked construction awhile in the boom towns across the West before he tried his own company selling construction and building supplies. By anyone’s reckoning he had done all right. It just took too much damn effort, smiling and greeting people and shaking hands and trying to pretend he gave a damn. It was only when he had been audited by the Revenue Department that he found his calling. Having to round up the various permits and invoices Revenue Canada had brought him into contact with the world of Document Control; being able to sit alone in room full of files and paperwork with no one else around and no one much bothering to come and visit was a godsend for him. Snow sold out his company and took up the trade, all things to all men but nothing to himself.
    He had worked in Yokohama for the Japanese; in Jeddah, Aden and Tripoli for the Arabs; and was now in Noyabrsk for his sins. The other places hadn’t worked out. There were always too many people, too much … society. Other people’s realities had always been too much for Snow, his own not enough. Once he got to Noyabrsk, however, he started to feel better. That is, he started to feel less. He had made no friends, saved no money, gained nothing at all since coming to Russia except a new and harder picture of the world. But here, in the armpit of Europe, if not the world, at least he was alone, without family, commitment or responsibility; free to drink his slow way to