Pig: A Thriller by Darvin Babiuk Page A

neighbours or words. Snowden Nastiuk, he had been christened. Snowden was his mother’s maiden name, the son receiving the name to honour the mother, the only time his father had ever shown such an inclination. Nastiuk was his father’s family name. Nastiuk was a Ukrainian name, so Snow and Magda had something in common after all.
    Snow’s father was nasty, rude and abrupt, with little time for anything that didn’t have four hooves or a twist-off top, which left his son on his own. After Snow’s mother decided to celebrate the arrival of Spring by walking down to Lee’s Creek and drowning her sorrows in the mountain run-off, Nasty Senior dealt with her death the same way he handled all of life: he ignored it. He made sure his son was fed and clothed, but that was about it. The rest of Snow’s upbringing, he washed his hands of.
     

     
    Snow had only vague childhood memories of his mother before she died looking for the exit sign at the bottom of Lee’s Creek. How she’d return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a basket of eggs and a bucket of frothy milk hanging from each arm. Snow would sit around the snug cabin watching her bake bread, put down preserves, roll out dough for the perogies. No matter how busy she was, she always took time to share stories with him. Like the ones of Grandpa growing up in the Dust Bowl. Grandpa claimed during the Dirty Thirties, his folks would throw a gopher in the air and if it dug a burrow before it hit the ground, they would know it was too dusty to send the kids to school that day. Or of the baseball player rounding second base who ended up lost for three days and was finally found four miles out of town.
     

     
    The ranch was home -- no, the universe -- to him. Snow learned more there than he ever could have at any school. He learned practical economics. He learned how to get along with adults. He learned how to be alone. About Life and Death. About sex and how babies got made. Most important was what he learned from watching his father. Work was what men did. Not whining or screwing around or feeling sorry for themselves. Work. A man was someone who worked hard, shut his mouth and bent over and took all that God could give him. And if it hurt, so what? That was what God invented booze for.
    Other than the occasional rancher or Hutterite who dropped by, there was no one to tell Snow what was going on outside. Only afterward, after he started working overseas and his jobs had become his National Geographic , teaching him what the larger, outside world was all about, did Snow come to realize just how strange a life it was. How hockey ever reached out and found him there he had no idea. Because, if the mountains had been formed by glaciers scouring the land, hockey  --  he knew -- had  been invented by God. That – hockey – was what had kept him sane. That and some other thing. Some other one.
     

     
    “You like hockey?” Magda asked.
    Snow stood up and the bones in his backbone cracked like dominoes being slapped on the table. “No,” he answered. “I used to like hockey. It’s kind of like sex before marriage. It used to be fun. Now, it’s just one more damn thing to take your pants off for.”
    “What else do you think is too much trouble to take your pants off for? I mean besides sex and hockey?”
    Snow shrugged. “Pretty much everything,” he admitted. He reached into his pocket and slathered on a layer of Chap Stick to keep his lips moist. Magda watched him with interest. Vanilla with a hint of black cherry and some lanolin. There was something better than pork lard to be found here.
     

     
    “What are these?” she asked, tugging at the box of Coffee Crisp bars Snow kept under his cot. “Do you mind?”
    Snow sneezed from the dust rising up from the box. “Why not.”
    Magda leaned down and helped herself to one of the golden wrappers. It was the start of a lifelong relationship. The confection proved to become a very popular item at