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about the job in Labrador. As he started towards his car he heard a short shrill whistle, and turned to see Everette coming out behind him.
    “Come here — just for a moment,” he said.
    Michael hesitated, shrugged and went back into the shack. Everette sat at the table smiling, a huge grin on his face.
    “You didn’t think you were going to get away this easy, did you?”
    “What do you mean?” Michael said, feeling nervous.
    Everette then said that Michael owed him at least one favour.
    “One favour — okay,” Michael said, smiling, “One favour before I go. What is it?”
    It was a warm, white night in May, with some snow still at the edge of the woods. The birds were singing late into the evening, and tamaracks were budding behind them, while a whiff of dark smoke rose from the dump a little ways away.
    “What?” Michael asked.
    “I want my chopper back,” Everette said. “My Harley.”
    Then he picked up a hammer and tossed it against the wall, so close to the little boy’s head that it surprised everyone, except, it seemed, the little boy himself. “And I’m not paying 426 dollars either.”
    “Why, where is it?”
    “Ken’s shop,” Everette said.
    He wanted to get his bike out of the shop where he had taken it to get it painted. The shop was across the river on a back street behind a half-dozen houses. The man had threatened him, Everette said. The man had used him, and tried to “besmirch Gail’s name with bad language and called Gail a slut.” (Here her little boy looked up.) The man was out chasing Gail even though he had a wife at home. Here Everette shook his head as if he couldn’t go on.
    Michael formulated a vision of Ken as a conniving, machiavellian, unprincipled man who was trying to steal Everette’s bike and ruin the Hutch reputation in the neighbourhood where they grew up.
    “Always it is the same” Everette said. And then he ended by saying: “Will you come with me? I need you with me. The man’s as much a bastard as that Tommie Donnerel. I tell you about Tommie — we owned a fishing camp together — put money in a pickle jar just like this — but his drunken old man kept interfering, and finally stole the money, so I ended with nothin — “
    Michael did not like to hear this. Yet he felt for some reason he did owe Everette at least one favour. He did not know why he felt this. He felt in fact that he owed him a great deal. Cicero once wrote that men are sometimes grateful when men of power do not kill them, and Michael had read Cicero before — read that very line, and felt it could never pertain to him.
    Michael sighed. That night Michael’s parents were having a special dinner, and had invited someone to meet him, as a surprise.
    “Okay, but I have to get it done — and get on home. And then I’m done with all of this!” Michael smiled.
    “If we get caught — we’re in a scrape,” Everette said simply, looking down and spitting between his legs, tapping his boots on the dusty floor, and then looking up and yawning, to watch Michael’s reaction.
    But Michael was not at all frightened of this, not at this moment with the sweet-smelling air, the feel of springtime, and the feel of his own strong body.
    Michael caught little Gail Hutch’s look at that moment. She had been waiting for days for him to talk to Everette, to try to get him to settle down. With her hopes dashed, she went over to the bed and sat down, stroking her son’s hair.
    The smoke from the dump seemed solid and pleasant as they left and drove to Chatham in Everette’s truck,
    The shop was small and cramped. There was the smell of earth and oil and wood, and the gleam of four or five bikes in various stages of being painted or repaired. It looked like the shop of a man who bore no relation to the description he had just suffered.
    The door was wide open and Everette’s Sportster was sitting near the front, behind a small Honda. They moved the Honda and rolled the Sportster towards the