Salvage King, Ya! Read online

  If pressed I prefer the far west of anywhere, of Ireland to England, Spain to France. Something basic in me demands mystery, milltowns, low population, haunted bedrooms, stupidity, to bounce off walls and crash my semi-new old car. My car’s small engine is hotter than a pistol, four bored-out cylinders, dual carbs.

  I’m going home through braids of lightning and bad tires, button accordions and rust-coloured deer visiting Ukrainian graves; I’m driving home through flyspeck cafés, boxcars rolling all evening, all night, hard rock miners walking into the earth, into the dark interior of the continent. I am falling from the newspapers, into memory or the New World’s capacity, not for regret, but to forget.

  No one, including myself, has a memory. We prefer to think otherwise. Memory is a slippery slope; the car drifts up one side of a mountain, slides down the other slope under red snow and spring avalanches, cornices and ice castles iridescent in sun, climbers on zweikanters, on ziggurats, like gnats on frozen waterfalls, hanging on a big icicle with avalanche bowls directly above and below. Dozens of climbers dead this past year, the hardest routes and approaches named after the dead ones. My former wife Kathy is now a widow.

  I am going home and going into a motel room not big enough to swing a cat in. I am driving clouds of quartz and ivory sparks, driving the Great Plains as I fall from the papers, as I pass waivers for the last time.

  It’s hard to stop cold turkey. One day you’re a New York Ranger screwing a Vogue model, doing coke off her famous belly; one day you’re sleek as a whippet and smiling in sunglasses, you’re media property, you’re a midtown parade. The next day you’re pumping gas at a Petro-Can in Moose Jaw or flinging yourself from a bridge in Flin Flon. Next day you’re sweating in the salvage yard.

  Adjust they say, adjust.

  What do they think I am? A thermostat?

  I listen to the Ramones and the Yardbirds all day long in the wind-buffeted car. There was one shadowy mountain off by itself. I swung around it at high speed. In Cut Bank, Montana I read a Gideon’s bible: And Lord God formed man from dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils. God breathes the last of the coke into my one good nostril. Maybe it isn’t morning after all.

  I try to imagine things with and without my Intended. I try to imagine things without one eye, walk around with one eye closed.

  One November IIth I tried to phone the Intended for Remembrance Day, and the operator said (if you break faith with us) “What city please?” (we shall not sleep). There were other distracting voices on the line, nasal phrases, blue radio stations.

  I try to phone Kathy. Just maybe I should have stayed with Kathy, stayed with the ex. One of those thoughts. Every Christmas I buy her a horse calendar. She’s not answering her phone. She’s slipping out. In Cut Bank, Montana I finally find sleep, close the second eye.

  Then I am home to the lake, to my wooden cabin, to climb from my car, air out the cabin, rake some leaves, to hang out, visit with Kathy the climber’s widow, hang out with Neon, now a trendy photographer, and Shirt Is Blue, the ever-expanding ex-rodeo rider. To adjust, eat off my old English plates.

  I drive up Shirt Is Blue’s crackling drive. Shirt Is Blue hears the car tires, finds me at his giant yellow pine door, yells, “You’re back. Of course, of course, that special time of year. Come in, come the hell in! Our professional pilgrim, our prodigal sonofabitch. Got my ugly pants on today. You can forgive me?” He grins in his army coat, belly looking bigger than ever, and probably some new blue tattoos somewhere on the illustrated man.

  And Neon hovering, hanging back like some old high school rival with his dark eyes watching us, says Hmmm ahyup, whatever that means. Hair in his suspicious eyes, his skinny artist hands smeared with oil paints and turps, rubs them briskly on his pants to shake hands formally.

  Oil in the ground all around here and ugly pumpjacks bow and rise, iron supplicants kissing earth. Jawbone Lake lies astride a narrow band of oil and gas, the field travelling from NE to SW, the petroleum collected in a reef of limestone.

  Over this reef: cattle, speedboats, knock-kneed herons. Also my family junkyard.

  The oil boom is over. Above the yard I see halos, halos around the moon tonight, celestial light working through ice crystals and cirrus clouds, visible as far as Belly River, and south into Idaho and Utah. My knees hurt like hell.

  The hockey paycheques have ceased. No per diems, no hotels, no free lunch. I’m history, I’m a dinosaur (while oilwells and roughnecks drill through dinosaurs). The paycheques have ceased. My phone rings: blown-dry bankers asking politely about their bank’s pound of flesh.

  “Did you think you wouldn’t have to pay it back?” queries the snotty voice on the phone. At the bank they’re so pleased to be on the side of right, to have the papers on me. Voodoo economics was their major. They assume I’m a block of wood.

  Back into my semi-cool car.

  I’m in the city in an hour. She looks happy. The wind blows from the mountains. The nerve-jangling wind always blows here, blows grit eight miles down the avenue just to find your open eye. I’m peering around to see what’s changed. I’m up in the condo looking west at the mountains.

  “How was the drive?” she wonders. “I wouldn’t mind getting out on a road trip. You’re probably a little sick of the road. Are you very tired? You got white line fever? Want some hot tea? I have some loose Assam tea that’s pretty nice. A bucket of clams? A cold beer? I put some Big Rock in the fridge for you.”

  The thought of her stocking beer for me touches me the most.

  “I missed you I did.”

  My Intended seems smilingly tranquil, a self-sufficient woman, clear as light, a hopeful gambler. I realize I don’t know her and yet there are so many plans, so many possible intimate futures. Do you need to know someone? The condo is so bright, no curtains, huge clean drafting table, shining tile fireplace, and the university station playing a band that sounds like a smashed Doris Day backed by Crazy Horse in their dark feedback and tequila period. Que sera sera, they croon unsteadily while wind blows huge white clouds past my Intended’s bright blue window frames. A room you could float right through.

  “You all right?” she asks. “Come here.”

  “Oh sure, sure. Jumpy. Bank after me is all. How’s the new place?” I ask.

  “It’s an investment I hope. Look at those beastly birds. Out there all morning waiting for something. Sometimes I feel they’re looking at me, looking sly, like a bunch of juvies with too much time on their hands. Come here. You need some Tylenol? How are your hands?”

  I show her my mashed swollen thumb, blood and pus under the partly lifted nail. A slash in front of my own net. I can’t even remember who did it but I know it was in front of our net. It makes it hard to button buttons or tie shoelaces, small things like that. And I keep hitting it.

  “I’ll get some Tylenol later. It’s not too bad.” I look out. Below our window big-beaked ravens relax on wires above women in fur laughing outside the doors of the gingerbread funeral chapel. What are the women in furs finding to laugh about? Gardeners always hovering at the funeral home, making it pretty. Ravens: those lovely hoarse voices.

  My Intended wears ironic serious eyeglasses, works hard in the city, and lives in her new condo beside ruined millionaires, across a lane from an establishment that deals in bodies, processing bodies since 1912. Down the avenue you can buy a bucket of clams or rent a million movies. She works desks and offices and I play a game, a game with a stick. She has to work. She’s climbing the ladder, assailing the ceiling, erasing the ceiling, likes to be kept busy, be involved.

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “I’ll put the kettle on.” I believe she likes board games (fond childhood memories of Monopoly, parcheesi), likes brook trout when I catch it. She favours old men’s hats: say a porkpie hat or a tweed newsboy’s cap worn backwards. Like any of us, she is subject to inexplicable sadness at odd times, say when balancing teacups on the fruited plain; she claims rain is her favou
rite colour, winter her favourite season. She likes winter yet my Intended does not skate, my Intended refuses to see my games.

  I will go back and forth, north and south, city and country, try to figure some things out. I will take care of things. Fifty miles is nothing. Not after driving between Philly and Seattle a few times.

  CHAPTER 3

  Choking Chickens

  Maple Leaf Gardens: a creative cretin in the crowd yelling at me over and over, “Hey Drinkwater! Don’t wanna be down on the farm team do ya, down on the farm choking chickens?!”

  I wade into the surf of the crowd, choke him, clean his clock.

  There is a chance of rain and a chance of being an idiot.

  So they send me down to the farm, to bury me. A blunt message from the powers that be.

  The forward with Phoenix, an Oiler draft pick, comes at me, using me for a screen, and powers a slapshot right past my midsection. His shot breaks our goalie’s stick. I ice the puck up high, ring the glass to get a whistle, to let Dobozy the redhead goalie pick out a new stick.

  “He broke my stick,” Dobozy complains, sounding offended, “my good stick.”

  “There, there, don’t cry.” I’m just glad the Phoenix guy didn’t maim me with his slapshot, a howitzer, a cannon blasting by my gonads. He rang a wicked one off our goalie’s mask; out cold. 120 M.P.H. Now: imagine that it’s another game in Podunk that means nothing and it’s YOUR head, your face on the line. The pruneface scouts at the end of the arena jot down the following brainstorm: “LACKS DESIRE.” Fuck them. As if they have the market cornered on desire.

  Same goalie: Dobozy, Bozeman, Bozo, Boz. I’m backing in, plant and catch their guy with my hip as he tries to motor around; he flies in the air, lands flat on the ice, but swipes with his stick at the puck. The puck creeps along the ice, not a raise, and Dobozy misses it. How? It’s going maybe 2 M.P.H. He stops them at 120 and lets them in at 2.

  I laugh—I have to laugh, and Dobozy swears at me.

  On the bench: “This goalie’s a sift.”

  “It’s sieve,” I say, “not sift.” SILENCE.

  Sure, thanks college boy, I imagine them thinking.

  I’m making small talk with Waitress X inside her crowded one-bedroom apartment; my first time there and we’re planning a late lunch on the avenue. We talk about this and that.

  “So,” I finally ask, “are we going to sleep together?” I’m nervous with her and I want to get this out of the way.

  She laughs at me: “Don’t you have any lines? Everyone else has lines.”

  I can’t remember them, I say, it’s been too long. This is the role I’ll play, the slightly older weary guy, not a Romeo, self-deprecating, dispensing with formalities. Honest as the day is long. On her tapedeck she plays Tom Waits: “Romeo Is Bleeding.”

  We’re on the couch: “Now I’ve seen them.” Her nipples are brown, darker than the Intended or my Ex-wife.

  “I love your grey hair,” Waitress X says, running her hands through it. “Is your father grey?” She has large bony hands and feet. She makes me feel small in a way. It feels nice, new hands in my hair. There are two old green armchairs stuffed with horsehair. She bought them from dead people at a farm auction in the flat sugarbeet country south of town. Her place is a comfortable refuge, a soft forbidden nest in diffuse pearly light. No one knows I’m here. That’s a plus. A hiding place with a black and white checkerboard hall. But what happens when you need a refuge from the refuge?

  You don’t look married, the waitress tells me. It is too pleasant to be with her. When we are necking in the back of a taxi, swans fly past. Swans! You reach for what you cannot have and then you get it. That getting may be the route to all troubles. Something pulls us down. I step into her waist, her nympha. She’s my need, she wants to be bitten. I mean hard. She’s worth rage, wallet, whatever. I was afraid I would bite her nipples off but she insisted: Harder. Harder.

  Shirt Is Blue is a horse-shoer who must be pushing 250. Food over his shirtfront. He always looks happy to see you. Gravel voice like a pirate. Biting an onion, Shirt Is Blue swears they are the same ravens at our lake decade after decade. “They never die; my father said so and my grandfather. Ravens they never die.” Same ravens when B.C. banged into Alberta.

  Shirt Is Blue owns a 7-Eleven somewhere in the wilds of southern California, knows tiny airstrips all over. He does what he wants but he moves slow because of smashed rodeo ribs. Tough horses stoved him in a few times, got even. They behave for him though when he shoes them. Protocol and instinct. They stay in line for Shirt Is Blue but never for me.

  In his kitchen Shirt Is Blue talks enthused geology with me, rattles on about seabeds rising up and then whittled down, the marriage of sediment, ups and downs, talks of wives, ex-wives.

  Shirt Is Blue shouts out religious lines in a mock theatrical voice: “And WHY will thou (my son) be RAVISHED with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?” He learned all this years ago from the Oblate priests. I never know when he’s serious, what he knows.

  “No, that’s my one rule. No married men.” The waitress’ voice.

  Then despite this one rule we’re on the scratchy carpet. I like being on top, she says, as if apologizing. Rules, breasts, rules, Waitress X on top of me moving and I watch her, both of us mirrored in the Quebec armoire, trapped in a glass. The door bell rings. Pinned to her floor, trapped by her. Jesus, tell me it’s not her boyfriend. Ignore it, she says. How?

  One more ring. She refuses to budge.

  Never again, I swear to myself, NEVER! He’ll be flying through the ground floor windows next; they’re huge and swung open.

  “He’s come in that way before,” she says. A baseball bat, a knife troubling heaven: my life will end under a woman.

  But whoever is at the door rings twice and leaves. She has so many friends and I have so few. She laughs at my nervousness.

  Tomorrow? she asks later.

  Tomorrow would be fine, I say, ahem yes tomorrow, as I watch her dress sift down the circles of white breasts, lit from within it seems, watch her slip back into the unknown, as I lose her to the mundane. She has compelling eyes, a promise inherent. She’s been with the professors and they liked her looks. It’s not simple sex, some other trajectory is dragging me. Whatever it is, there is some pull and secret power to it.

  Hi there, I say to my Intended, Hi I say as I enter the ivory door, past the feeble clasp, onto the hardwood’s arcs and machined lines of grained light.

  “What a day at work,” my Intended groans happily from the purple sofa. “What did I do to deserve this? They’re the ones making the big bucks, not me. One whiff of a scandal? They collapse!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Waitress X and Music for Airports

  Now I have done it, unbelieving even as it happens, as I enter, as her face is rearranging itself. Detached and watching the act, a neutral lens, this saves me from conscience, for it can’t really be happening. We moved from her living room to an old fashioned sagging bed. We have everything off but I don’t know how. I’m getting a delayed impression of her small underwear barely holding onto the cusp of her hips, viewed from the side, close to my face, a brain-chemical flashcard. Then one leg moves just slightly, enough. I am being unfaithful, not just necking or flirting but actually taken in by someone else, knees in her iron-posted bed and seeing how she stares at first and stops staring later and thinking of her as a serious alternative to the Intended. I’m not sure, however, that she wants to be an alternative. I think she’s just collecting me. I’m a project.

  I’m nervous as hell, but I want to stay with her. This changes things, this sentiment can’t be underestimated. She is different. Each person is new. I pause. I have to stop for a minute.

  In bed with me, Waitress X says, “I was an au pair in France when I was 17. Just before I met my family, the family that hired me, I was attacked by a man at the airport. Maybe I looked like an easy mark, a little lost lamb. The family in France was quite prosperous,
had their own orchards, workers. Their son, the family’s son was adopted. The parents beat him, beat him regularly. I adored him. When I had to come back to Canada at the end of the summer the child was screaming for me. My name. I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the boy with them, I wanted to call the gendarmes, my mother, someone, perhaps God. Another man chased me in the airport. I got on the stupid plane. I flew back to Canada. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t take him with me.”

  She is in tears now beside me. I want to stay with her, change my ways.

  “I flew back to Canada. I still wonder what happened to that boy. He was adopted and they hated him.” She pauses, she has to stop for a minute.

  “Of course the father came on to me.”

  Yes, of course, I think.

  Her closet door is wrecked where her boyfriend Will threw her recently. Are they broken up or not broken up? She and Will exist in that orphan hinterland of the blood. Nice old apartment, a piano in shadows, peasant blouses heaped on her messy bed, an orange cat that is permanently asleep or stuffed, framed pictures of her and her boyfriend grinning happily on a beach in Hawaii. Am I the only Albertan who has not been to Hawaii?

  Waitress X’s cracked closet door reminds me of Bonita years and years ago in downtown Edmonton, her bathroom door broken. Bonita told me some of it in a cryptic phone conversation but I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t tell what she meant, what had happened; she said there’d been some trouble with the police. I thought the police were after her and her nightclub friends. I didn’t understand. I thought it was her usual “hijinks” with her downtown crowd. But that night I closed the bathroom door behind me and saw how the old brown wood of the door was broken with a long vertical fissure. Not until then did I realize how serious the assault was. She must have barricaded herself in the bathroom, the bolted door cracking as he threw himself at it. He had a steak knife. He lived in the same building as her. She’d spoken with him once in the laundry room. Perhaps he followed, her detergent (New! Improved!), plump towels folded and underwear fresh from the dryer. A trajectory. I felt I should go knife him. Old Testament, eye for an eye. Have a look (the team yells, Have a look!).