The Best Laid Plans (16 page)

I returned home to the cacophony of a revving engine, reverberating through the walls of the boathouse. When I looked in the window, I was greeted with yet another bizarre sight. The craft appeared to be hovering with its skirt fully inflated, looking like a giant inner tube surrounding the entire vessel. From my vantage point outside the door, I could just see Angus’s legs, emerging from underneath the near side of the hovercraft. By my reckoning, this would put his head directly under the fan and engine mounted on top. His legs weren’t moving, and for all I knew, he’d already been decapitated. I opened the door, unsure of what to do next. Option one was to crawl under the craft and
check on Angus. Option two was simply to head upstairs and forget what I’d seen. Option two won by a landslide, but I found enough balloting irregularities to throw the legitimacy of the vote into question.

On my stomach, I easily wriggled under the pressurized skirt. It gave way lightly, spilling air around me as I inched underneath. The noise was fearsome. There was some light underneath, shed through the fan housing. In it, I could see with considerable relief that Angus had not been eaten by the evil hovercraft but was calmly working on the scoops that could swing down into the air flow and redirect it through the side vents on top of the hovercraft.

I could tell by the way he banged his head on the underside of the hovercraft when he saw me that he hadn’t expected us to meet in this particular location. He waved his wrenchy-thingy at me with some menace. Eventually, I figured out he wanted me to return to my normal upright position outside the confines of the hovercraft’s air cushion – what he called the
plenum
. I slid back out and was brushing the sawdust off my jeans and sweater when he appeared at my side. He reached into the cockpit and dialed back the engine until it stopped. The craft immediately settled onto the floor of the workshop as the skirt billowed out, now free of the solid form it was given by the rushing air.

“That’s twice now you’ve snuck up on me, Addison! A third time will find you in the river,” he bellowed.

“I’m sorry! I thought you were dead, crushed by the weight of your own masterpiece. What would you have done if you’d walked into the workshop and seen my prone and stationary form, sticking out from underneath as the engine roared?”

“I’d have dropped a ball-peen hammer on yer crotch and told you to get the hell away from my hovercraft.”

“All right, all right, I give up. You think I enjoyed crawling into the belly of the beast to save you? In the future, I hereby promise not to attempt a rescue regardless of your predicament,” I intoned with due solemnity, and my right hand raised.

He softened, and a flicker of a smile flirted with the corners of his mouth. “Aye, but you did see the height of that cushion?” His smile germinated.

“I sure did. It was flying high. It’s amazing, Angus. Congratulations.”

“Aye, the cushion pressure’s even higher than I’d calculated, and the skirt leaked not a molecule of air.”

“Except when I crawled underneath.”

“Aye, but that’s behind us now, laddie.”

We sat out on the dock, he with a shot of Lagavulin and I with a cold Coke. The river moved with gentle purpose towards the east. I told Angus all about the briefing session with Zaleski and Stanton, including the dismal and still declining Liberal support in Cumberland-Prescott. Angus was utterly exhausted and quite short of breath when his laughing jag eventually slowed to a dull chortle. The Lagavulin spread in a wet splotch across his flannel work shirt where he’d dumped the scotch in the throes of hilarity. He finally grew silent, save for his wheezing.

He could tell that I was not pleased by his over-the-top reaction. “I’m sorry, but I couldna help myself. Besides, I should be more upset than you. I know plenty more than 140 people in this town. I thought my support would be at least up around 275,” he sputtered before convulsing again in poorly restrained giggles.

“Yuk it up all you want. It’s no skin off your hide. But I still have to face my former colleagues in the Leader’s office, and I can tell you, my stock is in free fall.”

“Are you absolutely sure about the numbers?” he asked after a while.

“Plus or minus 3 percentage points 19 times out of 20,” I sighed.

Angus nodded with some finality. We sat in relative silence for a time as the sun traced its arc towards the west.

“So when do you leave for Papua New Guinea?” I inquired.

“I’m off the day after tomorrow until very late the night of this blasted election. And dinnae think my timin’ is coincidental. My
bags are packed, my passport is primed, and I’ve already booked a cab to the airport,” Angus explained with some satisfaction.

“Angus, I would have taken you to the airport,” I commented.

“Not in that death trap on wheels you won’t. Besides, what if there’s a campaign meeting scheduled in the back seat at the same time. I wouldna’ want to take HQ out of commission even for an hour,” he mocked gently. “It’s kind of you to offer, Daniel, but I’m takin’ no chances.”

“Well, after today’s sobering lesson in public opinion, you can leave with a clear conscience. Nothing threatens Eric Cameron’s coronation. He will have succeeded in hoodwinking 38,000 voters yet again, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. I feel about as useful as a seamstress in a nudist camp,” I said.

“Aye, I’ve never been to a nudist colony,” Angus remarked with what appeared to be genuine interest.

I had a night of marking ahead. My E for E students had handed in their first assignment the week before, and I had studiously avoided reviewing them. I just wasn’t sure what to expect, based on how the classes were proceeding. I bid Angus good night and climbed up to my apartment. By ten o’clock, I was halfway through the book reports. Most were as I expected – pathetic. But occasionally, I found a diamond in the rough or, as it turned out in one case, a
diamonoid
. A particularly obnoxious and boisterous engineer, who usually sat amidst a cabal of disciples, had apparently read – and had written a book report on – John Irving’s
A Prayer for Owen Meany
. This book was one of my favourite novels, and I was intrigued, if not a little suspicious. His book report was outstanding. He picked up some fine nuances in the characterization and provided compelling comparisons and contrasts with some of Irving’s other works, notably,
The World According to Garp
. I was impressed, but my spidey senses were tingling to beat the band.

Have I mentioned that Google is a wonderful thing? I typed a particularly cogent and well-crafted sentence into the powerful search engine and banged Enter. Busted. In seconds, several
different versions of the essay appeared in an orgy of plagiarism. He was smart enough to hijack an appropriate essay but not smart enough to realize that I would know he couldn’t possibly have written it. Plagiarism is a big deal at universities. Just ask Dean Rumplun. I had the authority and the evidence to put this guy on probation, if not out the door. But I also had the power to be lenient and forgiving with a student whose engineering career could be crippled by one youthful indiscretion. After the quick chat I planned to have with him, I figured he’d be a little more attentive in class and hoped his acolytes might even follow suit.

As I lay in bed, Angus was still engaged below me, though mercifully the ear-splitting engine remained idle. As usual, I could hear him chatting away in an almost jovial tone. Beyond his muffled musings, the only other thing that seeped into my room through the floor vents was the paint-peeling stench of one of his flatulent depth charges. I’d heard the noise but dismissed it as a particularly sonorous boat horn out on the river. I opened the window, gathered the quilt around my nose, and drifted off.

“I’ve marked your book reports, and you can pick them up on your way out. Some of you did very well for engineering students immersed in calculus and chemistry. Others of you made solid efforts but missed the mark by varying margins. I appreciate the time you all committed. I think as we get into the coursework, the remaining two assignments this term will come easier. You might even enjoy them,” I concluded, setting off a chorus of groans and head shaking.

It had been a somewhat encouraging session. After the nadir of my third class a few weeks ago, which had attracted only 37 students, I’d worked hard to make the lectures Angus had already outlined for me my own. I took the same approach I’d adopted to speechwriting for the Leader. In speechwriting, audience analysis was critical. You had to get into your audience’s collective head to know how to engage and hold them. In drafting speeches, I often took as much time thinking through the knowledge, needs, hopes, dreams, opinions, and attitudes of the audience as I did crafting the actual words to be delivered. This up-front analysis almost always paid dividends. In my experience, the toughest speeches to write were those destined for very diverse audiences where capturing one listener, by definition, meant alienating another.

My particular audience of first-year engineers was homogenous to the point of monolithic, which made my job of holding their attention at least a little easier. In what little time I had left over
from the campaign, I developed my lectures around engineering-related storylines and illustrations while still honouring the key literary themes Angus had outlined. My lectures improved, word spread, and my audience grew to respectable proportions. Even so, I was never able to convince all of the engineers enrolled in the course to attend one of my lectures – probably a good thing.

I tried to tap into the engineering part of their brains while making clandestine incursions into their latent artsy side. One day, we talked about the design and construction of the Bloor Viaduct, spanning Toronto’s Don River Valley, as the bridge to Michael Ondaatje’s masterpiece,
In the Skin of a Lion
, which featured this architectural wonder.

In another lecture, we discussed marine engineering and how sailing ships at the turn of the twentieth century were reinforced for Arctic exploration to withstand the blunt trauma of pack ice. This was my subterfuge to introduce Wayne Johnston’s excellent novel
The Navigator of New York
. The way I saw it, if you found the front door locked, sometimes you entered through a side window.