Way the Crow Flies Read Online Free PDF Page A

power carried by those columns of upreaching steel, high-voltage honour guard, girders of the golden triangle.
    “Are we there yet?”
    “Almost.”
    This part of the world was one terminus on the Underground Railroad, bordering as it does Michigan and New York State. There are still farms around here run by descendants of slaves who made that journey. People pass by and see a black woman driving a tractor and wonder where she’s from. She’s from here.
    A certain amount of smuggling still goes on back and forth across the border—things and, sometimes, people.
    Toronto is “the big smoke,” and there are major tourist attractions like Niagara Falls, but at the heart of the Triangle sits the medium-size city of London. There are a lot of insurance companies there. Big American corporations have regional headquarters in London, and products destined for the entire North Americanmarket are tested first on the consumers in this area. The manufacturers must think there is something particularly normal about the Southern Ontario Triangle.
    “Dad,” Madeleine asks, “why don’t they change Kitchener back to Berlin now that the war is over?”
    “Both wars,” he replies, “especially the last one, are still very much in living memory.”
    In living colour.
    “Yeah, but Germany’s not our enemy now,” says Mike, “Russia is.”
    “Right you are, Mike,” says Dad in his man-to-man voice, parade-square clipped, “though you don’t really want to say Russia. Russians are people like anyone else, we’re talking about the Soviets.”
    Soviets. The word sounds like a difficult unit of measurement:
If Joyce has three soviets and Johnny has twelve, how many soviets would they have if…
. Madeleine doesn’t press the issue, but feels that Kitchener probably knows that Kitchener is not its real name. The name change makes it seem as though bright shiny Kitchener has an evil secret: “My name used to be Berlin.
Heil Hitler.”
    Dad clears his throat and continues, “There’s an old saying: ‘Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.’”
    Which is proof that, once your name is Berlin, you should keep it that way. But Madeleine says nothing. There is smart, and there is “being smart.”
    There is a wall down the middle of the real Berlin now. It’s part of the Iron Curtain. Madeleine knows that it’s not a real curtain, but the Wall is real. Twenty-nine miles of barbed wire and concrete. The grown-ups say “when the Wall went up” as though it sprang up by magic overnight. “History in the making,” her father called it.
    Before the Wall went up, the border ran down the middle of streets, through cemeteries and houses and apartment buildings and people’s beds. You could go to sleep in the U.S.S.R., roll over and wake up in the free world. You could shave as a Communist and breakfast as a free man. Maybe they could build a miniature wall through the middle of Kitchener if they changed its name back to Berlin. That’s not funny. Communism is not funny.
    “Dad, are they going to blow up the earth?” she asks.
    He answers with a laugh, as though it were the first he’d ever heard of the idea. “Who?” he asks.
    “Are they going to press the button?”
    “What button?” says Dad. What snake under the bed?
    Mike says, “It’s not a button, it’s a metal switch and it takes dual keys, one for each guy, and one guy turns his key, then the other guy—”
    “And the chances of that happening,” says Dad in his my-last-word-on-the-subject voice, “are virtually nil.”
    “What’s ‘virtually’?” asks Madeleine.
    “It means it might as well be zero.”
    But it ain’t zero, is it, doc?
    They drive in silence for a while.
    “But what if they did press the button?” says Madeleine. “I mean, what if they did turn the keys? Would the earth blow up?”
    “What are you worrying about that for?” He sounds a little offended. She feels somewhat ashamed, as though she has been rude.