puters, so we’ ll be up to date on that sector as well. We’re looking to be front and centre on the future.” The kids had taken to wearing leather jackets, denims and sneakers no matter what weather conditions prevailed. “ that things really happen at the same time everywhere. You’re just on a time advance. Detroit’s time zone is three hours ahead, that’s all.” Doris gazed back at him, calmly superior. “Of course. That’s why we get all the important programs three hours before you get them. It doesn’t matter when things happen, anyway. It’s when people find out about them that counts. And we know about everything three hours before you do.” He left Doris’s place shaking his head. A small part of him was wondering if maybe she didn’t have something. After all, the national news did come from Toronto, and it was broadcast three hours late in the west. oris suggested that he Ddrop over to Jimmy Mart in ’s place. Jimmy, they said, watched ing out on the couch indifferently. more television than anyone in Huxley since he’d been laidChuck moved in on Janet. “ How o ff in the booming yards three months back. Jimmy was watching Detroit Today when Chuck arrived, but he invited the crew in anyway. “This'll be over in ten minutes, so you guys can set up while I finish watching this,” he said, waving Chuck and the crew inside. “There’s an hour of reruns between five and six. I can talk to you while those are on. It’s actually ten to five in Detroit,” he added. “ Here too.” “The little woman’s asleep,” Jimmy explained to no one in particular. “She can’t watch as much as I do. Oh, she gets up to catch the cooking programs and a few of the early soaps, but she sleeps most afternoons, and she goes to bed before the late movies start.” “ How much television do you watch on an average day?” Chuck asked, signalling that he wanted the camera rolling. Jimmy relaxed into the couch and pulled his feet up onto the plastic milk crate that served as both footstool and coffee table. “Oh, I don’t know. About twelve hours most days. But I can go up to fourteen or fifteen on a good day. Janet only watches seven or eight. Sometimes nine if I push her.” Janet appeared, bleary eyed. She sat down heavily beside Jimmy and stared at the television set. “What’s going on?” she asked. “ Nothing much,” Jimmy answered, w ithou t looking at her. “These guys came up from Vancouver to do a story on the dish. Someone told them we watch quite a bit, so they came over here.” “ Oh,” she said. “Anything interesting on?” She reached across Jimmy and changed the channel. “M.A.S.H. is supposed to be on channel 42 at five. Anything interesting later tonight?” “The usual,” Jimmy said, stretchdo you feel about the satellite dish, Janet?” he asked. “ Has it improved your life here?” Janet gazed up into the eye of the camera lens like a fish contemplating a baited hook. “Oh, sure,” she said, brightly. “ It’s a lot better. There wasn’t really anything to watch before the dish. Just five or six channels, that’s all. Really primitive.” “ Doesn’t all the programming about Detroit bother you? I mean, this is British Columbia. Detroit is a long way away.” Janet’s expression grew serious. “ I don’t know. I don’t mind it. I mean, Detroit’s real enough.” Jimmy interrupted. “ Life is the same everywhere now. The prime time lineup is just about the same wherever you go. Since we’ve had the dish we get more choice, that’s all.” “ How many channels do you get?”Chuck asked. “Gee,” Jimmy said, momentarily nonp lussed . “ I ’ ve never rea lly counted. Some of them are clearer than others. But there’s enough so there’s always something interesting to watch. You just keep flipping until you find what you need. There’s no need to count channels.” “ I understand that you lost your job a few months ago,” Chuck asked, feeling sly and investigative. “ How does that make you feel? Are you worried about the future?” Jimmy shrugged. “Yeah, that’s right. I did lose my job. But look. I don’t worry much. The dish helps. It fills up the time. And something will turn up. Janet’s thinking of getting pregnant, you know, and I’d just as soon be around for that anyway. Something will turn up,” he said, this time a little more blandly. “Maybe something in the auto industry. You may not know about it, but things are looking up these days in the industry.” huck Cambridge did sev Ceral more interviews before he left Huxley. The owner of the Huxley Motor Hotel rsuamidour had it that he’d been, ah, enthat he’d considered putting his entire business on Detroit time. He’d decided against it because the tourists would have found it confusing. And tourists had become an increasingly important part of his trade now that the bar wasn’t doing the local business it once did. “ People here just don’t go out like they used to,” he said, looking a little wistful. “They drink at home now, in front of the television. And goddamned if I can blame them, with all the programs we’ve got to choose from. I guess there’s a part of me that wishes the dish had never been installed. If things don’t change it ’s going to put me into the poor-house.” The high school principal trotted out the predictable authoritarian concerns about the collapse of school discipline, but he didn’t seem to object to the dish even when Chuck prodded him to say something hostile. “This is modern life, I guess,” the principal said. “When things change, a few good things are lost. That’s progress. As an educator I can’t object. It’s my job to teach Huxley’s children how to live in the real world, not in the past, however comfortable I may find it.” He went on to mention the school’s new communication program, and when Chuck said he wasn’t sure what that was, the principal told him that he’d voluntarily cancelled the schoo l’s library acqu is ition budget and had put the funds into educational video. “The students are much more comfortable with video materials,” he said. “And it makes the teaching loads easier as well. The School Board is getting us three microcomust about everybody in Huxley Jwas positive about the dish, except for some old English duffer who said that it was destroying the town and everyone in it. Chuck was a thorough investigator; he filmed the duffer’s side of it too, even though the old boy wasn’t too specific about why the dish was so destructive. Whatever it was he had to say got edited out of the four-minute story on Huxley that was run late in the Vancouver station’s news hour a few days later. A few people in Huxley tuned in to watch it, but Vancouver’s news hour fell into the middle of prime time. Dallas was on, and for most Huxleyites who remembered Chuck’s visit, the choice was an easy one to make. bout three weeks later Asomeone tied a couple of sticks of dynamite to the base of the dish, and right in the mi dle of Miami Vice, the explosion scattered the dish and half the cablevision office across the main street of Huxley. The local police investigated, and before too long, they traced the dynamite back to the owner of the Huxley Motor Hotel. Who knows why he did it. Maybe it was the interview with Chuck Cambridge tha t got him thinking. The corporal of the Huxley RCMP charged him with the crime, but the case never did get to trial. The night after the charges were laid, a group of the locals entered the hotel bar around 10:00 p.m., and after drinking for an hour or so, they wrecked the place. What happened after that isn’t clear. The owner simply disappeared. There were rumours, predictable ones. One of them was that when the owner left the premises around one in the morning, somebody put a knife between his ribs and then dumped the weighted body into the river. Another couraged to leave town, and pronto. His car disappeared with him, so that was the story the local police accepted, and a warrant for his arrest was put on the electronic wire. It was Huxley’s first All Points Bulletin, which made the corporal feel quite proud of himself but didn't result in an arrest. The Vancouver television crews showed up again, but this time no one in Huxley was talking, at least not about the owner of the hotel. The leader of the Chieftains did say that his people didn’t have anything to do with it but that he thought that the bastard had got what was coming to him. “Go talk to the honkys,” he said. “The hotel’s on their turf.” It took six weeks to replace the dish and the damaged cable system. The community really came together to get it fixed, and they paid the cost out of their own pockets to keep the Feds from coming in and busting them for having a dish illegally hooked into a community system. They had a benefit dance to raise funds, and even some of the Chieftains put aside their hostility toward the white community and danced up a storm. The new dish was hooked back into the Detroit network, and in a few days, life was back to normal. Brian Fawcett is a writer living in Victoria BC. This essay is fromCambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow(Grove Press, New York, $16.95). John Kleber is a Twin Cities painter and illustrator. Kim Klein is a Twin Cities art director. In the old days, people got off work and came down for a few beers before dinner. Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989 9
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