Salvage King, Ya! Read online

  SALVAGE KING, YA!

  ALSO BY MARK ANTHONY JARMAN

  Ireland’s Eye (travels)

  19 Knives (stories)

  New Orleans Is Sinking (stories)

  Dancing Nightly in the Tavern (stories)

  Killing the Swan (poems)

  Ounce of Cure (editor)

  Nothing North of Disneyland (chapbook)

  Surfer Joe Among the Fishes (chapbook)

  Dangle (chapbook)

  Salvage

  King, Ya!

  A HERKY-JERKY PICARESQUE

  MARK ANTHONY JARMAN

  Copyright © 1997 by Mark Anthony Jarman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the

  exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or

  other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in

  writing to Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency

  One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  This book is a work of fiction. Resemblances to people

  alive or dead is purely coincidental.

  Printed and bound in Canada by Houghton Boston Printers

  2nd Edition: September, 2003

  Cover design by Rayola Graphic Design

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance

  of the B.C. Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and

  the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP)

  for their support of our publishing program.

  CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Jarman, Mark Anthony, 1955–

  Salvage king, ya! : a herky-jerky picaresque / Mark Anthony Jarman.

  — 2nd ed.

  ISBN 1-895636-56-6

  I. Tide

  PS8569.A6S24 2003 C813’.54 C2003-911020-6

  Represented in Canada by the Literary Press Group

  Distributed by the University of Toronto Press

  Anvil Press

  6 West 17th Avenue

  Vancouver, BC V5Y 1Z4

  CANADA

  This book is for Sharon with love

  (Treat me like a Saturday night)

  And in memory of my father

  Sections of this novel have been previously published in the following magazines: Alaska Quarterly, Blood if Aphorisms, Capilano Review, Crash, CutBank, Dandelion, Descant, Event, filling station, Grain, Hawaii Review, Left Bank, Malahat Review, Matrix, Northwest Review, Passages North, Poetry WLU, Point No Point, Prairie Fire, Prism International, Quarry, Queen’s Quarterly, Rio Grande Review, Rust, sub-TERRAIN, TickleAce, Tremor, Victoria Today, and in the hockey anthology The Rocket, the Flower, the Hammer and Me. (These editors kept me sane.)

  The author would also like to thank the Canada Council, Alberta Culture, Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts, and the Cultural Services of British Columbia.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART 1: I FALL FROM THE NEWSPAPERS

  1: I Fall from the Newspapers

  2: Ex-Iron Man

  3: Choking Chickens

  4: Waitress X and Music for Airports

  5: Happy Happy Joy Joy

  6: After the Afterlife

  7: Are You the Jealous Type? (Yes.)

  8: Twin Carbs

  9: Exit Pursued By Bear

  10:I Will Drive a School Bus

  11: A Woman Turning

  12: Kingdom Fucking Come

  13: Our Lady of Peace

  14: Omaha: Gordie Howe Land

  15: Captain Kirk

  16: White-skinned, Never Mind

  17: Sexual Nebraska

  18: We Got Exotic

  19: Drugs: Part 1

  20: Drugs: Part 2

  21: King of Prussia

  22: Losing the Talwin Wars

  23: In the Failed Garden

  24: Harvesting the Brains

  25: Elvis Presley Sideburns

  26: The Drowned Coast

  27: Stones on My Tongue

  28: Do the Locomotion

  29: 33 Stolen Cars

  30: Cowtown Blues

  31:1 Took Scars

  PART 2: JOY DIVISION

  32: Saltwater Kill Zones

  33: The Bickersons Reconnoitre the Kill Zones

  34: The Fall

  35: Why Struggle?

  36: The East Slope of the Rockies

  37: In America the Carpet King

  38: The Anthems

  39: Riding the Pines

  40: Connecting the Dots

  41: Surfer Joe Among the Fishes

  42: The Land of No Odometers

  43: Arthropod Summer

  44: Cowboys Not Dancing

  PART 3: EUROTRASH

  45: The Wrong Train

  46: Lion d’Or

  47: Lord Weary’s Castle

  PART 4: BREATHING OUT

  48: The Cartoon Language of Storms

  49: My Agent: Drive, Lead, Act, Do

  50: No One Has a Memory

  51: Battle Hymn of the Apartment

  52: Hoarse Latitudes

  53: Chimney

  54: What I Know About Art

  55: The Green Lake Blinks

  56: Cleopatra X

  57: Cheekbones

  PART 5: THE LAST CHAPTER (NOTHING UP MY SLEEVE)

  58: Lucky Ticket

  PART 1

  I Fall From the

  Newspapers

  “He desired to have Kings meet him

  at railway stations on his return

  from some ghastly Nowhere, where he

  intended to accomplish great things.

  ‘You show them you have something in

  you, something that is really

  profitable, and then there will be

  no limits to the recognition

  of your abilities. ”’

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  and the way up is

  the way down, the way

  forward is the way back.

  —TS Eliot, The Dry Salvages

  CHAPTER 1

  I Fall from the Newspapers

  There is something sad about wind and fences. Hail lifts from the west as you say grace and eat a light supper with your Intended.

  The storm blows in an open window and soaks a quilted bed, flattens my neighbours’ crops, smashes all our careful gardens. Love burns slower than a tire, won’t be extinguished.

  Waitress X is taller than my former wife, Kathy; Waitress X is taller than me; Waitress X is taller still than the Intended. Such length in the wrist is unfamiliar. Waitress X has eyes ... (what colour can that be called?), gawky half-elegant posture, ballet slippers.

  I imagine her haunting a 1940s apartment, plants folding in and out of blinds, bookends of first edition hardcovers, terrifying Cape Dorset paintings making faces at me; but also a beat baseball glove, a good arm in slow pitch, the restaurant league. Perhaps a thing for jocks.

  You’re not hockey players, she says to one of the other tables. Her film noir dress, pale lipstick; she’s laughing at them, relaxed with me.

  Yeah, Detroit, they say, wanting to impress her. Like me.

  You’re not.

  Yes! We are! Motor City. Dee-troit Red Wings!

  Show me your teeth, she says.

  All three pull out their teeth.

  Young, I wanted to be hockey’s ace, a flash centre with a flawless face in The New York Times, with berserkers taking care of each wing, gorgeous brides of Jesus silently mouthing my name behind the trembling plexiglass. But I ended up playing the point, scarred no-name defence, staying at home with the nutcase goal
ie, tying up the goon squads in front of the cage, doing pushups on puzzlingly ugly hotel rugs. I ended up with the family junkyard, Salvage King Ya!, my inheritance, my home for prissy Edsels and their aged brethren and parts.

  I skate into the corners and ugliness floats with me. Thirty-three years of TV afterburn itch in my retinas; the team doctor talks of tests.

  Below my Intended’s art deco condo are dolphin fountains and a Victorian funeral home. On the windy back steps of the funeral home a woman in a dress spray paints roses until they are blue, some of her cosmetic paint flecking my souped-up car. I am accustomed to a rich pattern of car trouble.

  Cars played a star-crossed role in my first illicit date with the Intended, though that first date now seems so distant: A Rose Bowl party and this shy interesting woman and I drove down where big rivers come to pieces in the California breakers; we fooled around and fell into murmuring sleep. Then that groggy awakening with a great grey ocean in front of us, salt tide working in the car doors, and this woman’s boyfriend’s new BMW sucking into luciferous sand.

  Something pulls us down.

  Amazing the room down there, the beach now something more water than sand and the boyfriend’s car starts sinking, the car is sinking and we’re inside. The doors won’t open. We climb out the windows and $38,000 of tinted glass and sheet metal and financing compounded quarterly simply disappears in the muck, gone with our neon shoes and cassettes. Our bare feet slogging through cool water at the base of sandy red cliffs.

  What will I tell my boyfriend? she says, trying to put her serious glasses on, almost laughing at the trouble we are in. What am I going to tell him?

  I dunno, tell him you lost it. Ha ha, big joke. Houses on stilts grin above surf.

  Later, the enraged boyfriend, a fist in the centre of a curve, a tilt of red atoms, my nose broken yet again.

  Rats, I said. I never win a scrap.

  What a way to start. What a first “date.” Light and water run into each other after a bit and you can’t see. No idea which side my bread is buttered on.

  My future Intended was on the phone to an insurance company: “Well I’m telling you it did happen that way! Well I’d be interested in your definition because it’s certainly what I call an accident!”

  Her enraged boyfriend left in his rust bucket that stated on the bumper: “My other car is a BMW.” Was a BMW, I mutter through my rebroken nose.

  “Is that real blood?” ventured a wary busboy. My very first job was busboy, far north of here.

  “As seen on TV,” I replied, hoping for a laugh track.

  “A lawsuit to follow?”

  “No doubt.” The busboy got me a bucket of ice for my eye; refused a gratuity.

  Now, short years later, I’m the boyfriend. Now I’m the husband. The ex-husband. All of the above. Now I stumble in chambers of raging hips, maximum R&B, seed poised, apple salsa. Like everyone else, in a new town on an old planet, watching a clock’s black eye, under Heaven’s acicular eye.

  “Dinner?” queries my Intended, not unkindly, quite used to me now. “You really call a dozen rum and cokes dinner?”

  And over there, over there Waitress X, tall, an ash blonde wraith (do I detect colouring?) calmly reading Yeats on her break in a canvas director’s chair, a huge Latino mural glowing behind her inclined head, fountains running and flowers blooming and frazzled tourists stumbling in a tide around her chair and long legs, stumbling around her.

  Everyone hears the Intended pleading with me, everyone stares at me and sends mental telepathy messages: Buy her dinner for God’s sake! Or just go home before it’s too late.

  Things fall apart. My ears burn and I’m moony over this lanky waitress, over sensual music, neglect; I must get to know her. Why does it take me ten years to learn what everyone else and his dog knows right off the bat? Why?

  I can’t stop staring at the Waitress. She zigzags through her tables, past an ivory coloured fountain, zigzags a wake of laughter. She has a way of half-turning in fabric, in rubric, a hologram of light and charm about her body and face. She makes me stupidly shy. Her voice, damaged by childhood bronchitis, is now husky and sexual; drives me bonkers. She seems funny (funny ha ha) and she seems down to earth. I feel some simple immediate connection, like that one puck that went on a wire to a head. I feel some connection and buzz and I pose tourist questions simply for her voice, the chance of vice, hear her talk that talk. I drink in her section till I’m dumb, wearing a kerosene hat. Later I’m under a flowering tree somewhere, a river bottom. I identify her with a fountain rising in sunlight, with spring light and the end of winter.

  I have played out my option down in the States, run out of teams. No, I’ll catch on somewhere. Or is it finally over?

  You don ‘? look married, the waitress tells me later.

  I’m not married. Not yet. I went back, I went back to the fortress restaurant with the fountains as soon as I could. Her voice, her large lean face with its odd features. I try to stop peering into the side of her skimpy undershirt. Dressing for the holocaust. Muscles come up off the ribs, her knife peeling back silky layers, cutting green onion into pale stripes. Ninety-six tears, despite the ski goggles. I ate my weight in blue crab, ate my weight in cash.

  How exactly does one look married?

  Her eyes: her eyes have light green edges but something more substantial and difficult to define in their centre. I stare and can’t decide. Her pupil opens. I will enter. I’m taken. I talk to her, there by a wall against the wind, against the rushing grasses, the green sea of the world. She leaves to work the deck, to her impatient customers.

  “Back to the drunken businessmen,” she says, smiling at me, carrying someone else’s bland food on blank Syracuse china. They wait for her; they also believe in her and her damaged voice.

  Something sad about wind and fences. You eat a light meal and speak of love. Hail lifts from the west and offers itself.

  The sky over Kathy’s garden is a drift of silver and gold, the lake a salver. The steep slope falling to the lake below us blooms wild roses and orange rosehips, wild tiger lilies lighting white trees and dark glades.

  I see Kathy bent in her famous garden, the clifftop garden where the road veers above the lake, where my father used to honk the Oldsmobile’s horn at the blind corner. I wave at her. She doesn’t wave. Her pale hair always slipping loose; pushing her long blonde hair back from her colourless Scandinavian face. She looks almost albino, a resolute lack of colour; light drills right through her skin and cheekbones, fine lines starting to hold around her eyes and mouth. Kathy has the beauty of some old regret. Perhaps in once choosing me.

  My former wife Kathy surrounds her garden with hair swept from the Electric Indian Barber Shop, trying to stave, with these hanks of men’s hair, the deer from her steroid vegetables.

  “These damn deer are eating me out of house and home,” says Kathy. “I might as well invite them in for dinner,” she says. There is likely some of my hair in her collection.

  I drive on, glancing at her in the rearview mirror until she is the size of a thumb. Farther west of her figure I see midget lightning bending itself against the catacomb mountain wall where freezing streams hang like tinsel.

  In autumn I can see farther from my cabin’s side door. The sky loses light to ground the colour of straw. The ground pulls the autumn light in and suddenly won’t share. The lake is so quiet after the summer people are gone. I hear car doors THUNK and wonder Who? (And who, who wrote the book of love?)

  In the rich black fields north of the lake, huge combines the shape of condos smash through night-lit wheat. Red and green iron machines moving next morning through sun and dust off the yellow grain, all day diesel fumes levitating, air the vague colour of a clay pot, then wheels again driving in night, taking advantage of Indian Summer.

  By Halloween it will snow. Farmers will hit Hawaii while in the washrooms of Edmonton International Airport, Central Americans tear up their passports.

  The poplars only
grow so far and then fall on my cabin. As the poplars rise higher I have to extend the chimney. Smoke gets trapped. You grow up with wonky trees like this, like big adolescent weeds, and it affects you. The rest of your life it pulls at some October part of your brain.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ex-Iron Man

  That wintry winter with a farm team in upstate New York.

  “Have a look,” the coach yells at me. “Have a look! You got time!” they yell from the bench, believing they can actually affect the outcome of the play, the game, the season.

  We had a great shot at some decent playoff money, then our team hit a losing skid.

  “Man on you!” they shriek. All right already. They must think I’m blind.

  We hit a losing streak. The newest savior, the young draft pick, was hustled into detox, hustled into Hazelden rehab. They faked a knee injury for the press.

  A forward lost his left eye in the last game; it was my slap shot from the point. Usually I keep it low on the net, but I’d borrowed a stick with a weird curve.

  Shoot! they yelled.

  He turned into my wild shot, grimacing from a defenceman’s crosscheck to the small of his back; he was trying to block the goalie’s view.

  Have a look, the coach yelled. Shoot! they yelled.

  I shot with the borrowed stick and the puck moved on a wire right to his head. The forward’s eye collapsed like an egg and I didn’t want to look. No one wanted to look.

  Later the doctors had to take his eye out. We were bounced again from the playoffs. This is ultra-depressing.

  I stood outside that Adirondack rink for the last time, with little to show for it but an equipment bag and the car trunk rattling with hacked up sticks. Lighting out.

  I put the ’59 Volvo PV544 in reverse, angling out to flee the sharpened roofs of New England villages. I put the car in reverse once, then did not use that gear again for 3000 miles.

  West. Through Ithaca, Kokomo, Sioux City, Spearfish, Buffalo, Crow Agency, Little Bighorn, the Crazy Mountains, the Bitter Roots, the western sky a huge nervous system, my mind racing far ahead through Montana to enter the strange borderlands, cross the border into Alberta, Shot-Both-Sides, Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump; as the Lizard King says, the west is the best.