Salvage King, Ya! Read online

  Her parents were split up. She told me she’d been in a psych ward on the southside of town not long before we met, but she seemed rock-steady. I was a teenager. My best friend thought I was in over my head; and he was right I guess. School could not prepare me for this. I thought I was listening but I didn’t understand.

  I can recall few details except my adolescent stupidity. Bonita was so happy one Saturday morning playing on the warm sunny floor with her kittens. I was happy to wake up in her room and watch her in the sun and not be on a team bus or in my parents’ basement. I felt sophisticated waking up downtown. My new girlfriend. I knew I’d remember that scene and do seventeen years later. It was just days before she was attacked.

  Below her open bedroom window was a construction site, the oil boom in full swing knocking down my childhood landmarks: the radio station, candy stores, record store, bookstore, post office, court house, theatres—knocking down everything—excavators and tilting dumpers and front-end loaders beeping in reverse, the very first time I heard that warning sound; it later became an oil-boom anthem. I lay in her bed listening to them energetically smashing my childhood city and I was happy. They sold it all out from under us.

  A cream trolley rolled me home thirty blocks, delivered me from downtown and back to the venerable neighbourhood, past my ex-girlfriend’s rambling house across from the museum. The sight of my ex-girlfriend’s brick house seemed funny. I’d gone past so many times before, could imagine her family moving lazily through the large rooms, snacking, calling to each other, seeing if the Habs were on yet, or down in the basement destroying each other at ping-pong. I was slouched in the trolley wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday. I felt I was now in a different world. Two worlds and I liked them separate. How could they be the same, linked?

  Bonita didn’t want to see me much after she was assaulted. She wasn’t so happy, didn’t want to talk. A month later I was playing junior hockey on the coast. She told me she’d move out to the coast, join me, but she didn’t move to the coast. She said her landlord wanted her out, wanted her to pay for the wrecked door. Two doors. Apparently some guy who did the mannequins at the Bay carved up the outside door. This made her seem the problem. There’s a depressing Neil Young line: I waited for you winter-long. We wrote thick letters for a while. I got to like the coast, got used to the clouds. She landed a good job with the provincial government, a coveted job. She became busy (“Have to run!”) and I lost track of her. I dreamed of living with her under the marble clouds and trees of eagles.

  Waitress X arrives in white shorts over a blue spandex bathing suit.

  “You look space age,” I say. She looks good in the Jetsons suit. “She’d hate you,” I tell her.

  She knows who I mean. She undoes the ties in the sun, drops the front to work on her tan. It’s summer on the black and red willow prairie. We’re on an open porch on the front of someone else’s condo.

  “Bite them. Harder than that.” Four fingers under her, thumb over front. She murmurs. She likes it a bit rough. Later, a lawn chair scrapes on a deck above, a neighbor giving herself away. Has she heard us all this time? Is she spying? Women stick together—she’ll tell the Intended. But if women really stuck together would Waitress X be with me? An uneasy alliance.

  “Give me a boo,” she says to me from the car door.

  On her closet door is faded blood from her boyfriend’s fist. Waitress X was crouched inside the closet while the boyfriend threw his boots at the door. Thirty minutes later Will doesn’t remember smashing his hands, wants to go out for Chinese food with her, wants to be a happy couple again.

  Give me a boo, she allows, smiling from her car, eyes crinkly, her mouth tasting of menthol cigarettes. My Intended doesn’t smoke. On the other hand.

  Waitress X calls her friend Frederico to come over. He works at the restaurant I think. Frederico says sure, I’ll be over this aft but then he goes jogging with some model he just met and snubs Waitress X, leaves her hanging. Waitress X breaks up with her boyfriend for the 300th time. He punches her. She can’t phone me. I’m at home with the Intended and she can’t call me. She does her evening shift and walks home alone to her cat, thinking Everyone’s with someone. She holds this against me. Depressed, she can’t stay in her apartment, goes out. I go out to buy more milk just to phone her from the Black Cat Grocery, just to hear her voice. No answer at her apartment. No voice. She’s always out, I think, out fooling around. We’re all floating in limbo, out there with the unbaptized infants, the suspicious chrisoms.

  She rises in the morning, does her Jane Fonda.

  I rise in the morning inexplicably bleak, unable to snap out of it, dragging myself to the kitchen kettle. I’d forgotten these black moods. When seeing someone, involved, heavy dating, whatever you call it, I go up and down on a yo-yo, a ride at the Stampede. I really had forgotten. Marriage or common-law is so much less manic, smooth as yogurt. I don’t know if that is good or bad. A moronic dog was waking me all night, talking of its tether, its throat, its inarticulate tongue. There was yelling on the avenue: People needed to tell each other important things. Waitress X meets me at the same café to talk; the staff gossips, eyes us knowingly and we agonize over parking spots.

  CHAPTER 5

  Happy Happy Joy Joy

  In the fern bars of my latest fiefdom I ramble on as Happy Hour kicks in, two-for-one drinks. Different culture, I say. We can’t tell them what to do, so if a few Newfie fishermen can stay off welfare going out on the ice, clubbing a few goddamn seals or selling seal penises to China, then more power to them. It’s ‘cause they have those cute posters, little white seal peering up, big eyes, cute. No one gives a good goddamn how many armadillos or porcupines get run over every day because they’re not cute. That’s what it boils down to and Brigitte Bardot can go fuck herself the wrinkled hypocritical slut. Same with Greenpeace. Oh excuse me all to hell.

  Listen, the Intended says from somewhere in left field, You know I can leave you, I can go back to New Zealand. Don’t think I haven’t thought it. Ruining nice parties everytime you drink you.

  When you quarrel, everything you see or hear suddenly becomes code or metaphor: what’s on TV, how other couples get along, the ominous weather forecast, the sea going boom boom boom, the old air I hum: “I lost my love and I care not.” Everything seems loaded. I’m working on amnesia. Automatic doors ask so little, just that you be there. Their one rule.

  Jawbone Lake: my lake. Across the road from Salvage King Ya!, my precious junk yard, they are cutting the family trees. Culling with smoking Husqvarnas. I have worked out a deal with the prison; they provide labour, heavy equipment, I get half the sales of firewood.

  I take my father’s tiny blue sailboat out, feeling spiffy and upper class, sails singing at the ends of my fingers. It’s shortlived. The wind cranks up a notch or two. The wooden boom bonks my head, moving through my scalp like Latin; I tip the thing and am dumped in the drink any number of times, getting soaked and losing my topsiders and bailing tin, then I crash the sailboat into the dock just as Mark Messier speeds past pulling his younger sister on water skis. Mess is wearing shades, grinning back over the giant black motors. Twin Mercs, power, his kid sister bouncing in the wake crying, “Mark! Slow down! Mark! Slow down …”

  Mark Messier’s entourage has set up a volleyball net in the meadow by the lake. I study them with binoculars. He’s renting a cabin which the owners hope he’ll buy but I know he won’t: he wants to hit Bangkok, Bali, Maui, New York, New York.

  When playing hockey in upstate New York I noted trees, say a beech, spray-painted with a green x, meaning chop it brother before it’s gone hopeless with disease. Some vague malaise creepycrawling through the hardwood, through the previously exempt counties and nations, trees giving up the ghost that shouldn’t.

  Possibly wind damage, muttered a puzzled landscaper in an outback hat.

  I don’t think so, something else is eating them. Hardwoods give a great crash, rocking the earth for hundreds o
f yards, crumping down each side of the shaky upstate cottage (a former carriage house) I inhabited between road trips.

  I love skating in circles before each game because anything is still possible coasting ice in that breeze. We can win this one, guys. I’m a battery with two poles: I want to be cool but I want to jump! I’m fossil, an ancient bird moving extinct cells through a pressed mountain of coal. I’m a brain suspended on skates, Mercury coming in for a clean hit. Gravity is my religion: STAY UP.

  After a game it is different but before a game it’s all still possible.

  The lake bed is v-shaped, deep and drops quickly. A glacier lay here and left, lay here and left. Once there were tropical seas, coral and fern sand rills; now it’s rock and sand dunes and freezing lakewater, oil rigs feeding off the old strata, buffalo bones and big white stones bubbling to the surface of fields each year in a slow soup, breaking the teeth off my neighbours’ harrows.

  Kathy breeds Arabians just up the road from my cabin, fifteen hands, high withers, long croup, strong hocks. She has a couple good cutters, quarter horses, a registered paint gelding. I like her Percherons best, a matched team of heavy horses with Arabian blood. I like the Percherons.

  When we were married the two Percherons pulled us on a pink float in the Stampede parade. A team. Once we were a team. I truly believe cocaine evaporates. Morning: Gone!

  The morning weather is foggy and damp so I rub sulphur on the Percherons’ shaggy lower legs, to stop fungus or ‘scratches,’ to lessen calamity, to actually think ahead.

  “Dollface,” mutters Kathy to herself by the barn. “Babyface. Blah blah blah. A face becomes a little more complex they lose interest.” She pauses, says, “My face is becoming more complex.”

  Join the club, I think. My chin looks like someone took a knife to it. Years back Bobby Clarke slashed me open just under my nose; nerves a mite sensistive there and two nurses held my yelling head down and pushed the needle back and forth for twenty-seven stitches.

  During midnight mass we drink from a bottle of rye on the steps of the Cathedral of the Redeemer, over us the moon a grainy photocopy of a lost eye. In the pews a shaky voice lifts against the stone walls and statues and stained glass, singing of heaven and purgatorial fires.

  Shirt Is Blue starts singing along; he knows the words. Some of us are expelled, some are salvaged; some step through the furnace, some walk in the river, but grievous angels hang with us either way. My knees still hurt, but for several seconds I feel religious, chosen, more than a farm team peon, an expeon. I see frazzled gods labouring to steer us, hallucinatory, larger than horses, as clumsy as chemicals. At times the gods seem derelict: not deflecting the puck from the player’s open eye, not averting the blows from the woman leaning into the entrance to her dark closet, but they leave the driving to us. This is the new world, someone is telling me, get with the program, the covenant.

  CHAPTER 6

  After the Afterlife

  We are preparing to bury my favourite dog, Shirt Is Blue’s ancient Alsatian, and thus I am prone to trash and sentiment and it is grey and raining on our grief. The dead dog is in a red vinyl bag in the back of Shirt Is Blue’s Jeep, bouncing along with shovels, pitchfork, garden tools, crowbar, axe—anything likely we could find to dig a grave, to dump it into the afterlife. I killed it, her.

  We roar down the old Coach Road, past the big arid ranch, then north on the Forestry Trunk Road along rocky river flats, by pretty llamas and ostriches, and fields of polished stone, wet sand bluffs, and into Jurassic anticline valleys with glacial walls and silt humps, more and more dark conifers as we climb, engine whistling, whining, knocking like a hammer on sheet metal.

  “Which Indians live here now?” I wonder idly, trying to cause trouble.

  “No Indians live here now,” he says gruffly. He has intricate scars, homemade tattoos, sideburns, a big Easter Island face. Shirt Is Blue holds a good Cuban cigar he never lights.

  “Sure they do. Used to be Kootenay tribe but the Blackfoot chased them into the mountains. There’s Stoney too. Blood to the south, Cree to the north. I have a book . . . .”

  “That’s whiteman history. You have a book. You say Indians crossed over from Russia. Communists, or Buddhists. No Indians now, not really, eh. Whitemen have a great sense of humour.”

  “Don’t lay your guilt trip on me.”

  “Who else am I going to lay it on?” Shirt Is Blue asks.

  The Texas gates are noisy under the Jeep’s winter tires, a fast chord change.

  “Good question,” I admit after a moment. Who else?

  “Besides,” he says, “maybe Indians are happier now that they don’t exist. I bet I could sell a truckload of these Cuban cigars in the States now that Cuba doesn’t exist either. Something that doesn’t exist makes for a way better market.”

  I climb out and open the iron gate guarding the power company’s road, which snakes higher and higher in a rainy rocky trail over the Ghost River. A nice little valley to bury a favoured dog.

  We park the Jeep on a precipitous ridge, the Ghost River winding east toward us from yonder snowy mountains and glaciers and confluence plains. Far below I see a naked couple tubing down the river.

  It is hard labour to scratch a big hole in rock and mud; soon my new white running shoes are soaked and stained brown. We hit hard sandstone or shale two feet down and our antic grave-digging scene loses a little momentum, a little fire.

  Hot August and it’s nearly freezing up here near the glaciers (you can see so far), but the work feels good, almost a lark, digging, scraping, chipping rocks, telling stories, laughing, doing something for Ubo, the favourite dog, the dog I killed. More fun than rookies on a snipe hunt.

  “Maybe I am from Russia,” Shirt Is Blue says.

  “Maybe you’re about as Indian as I am, eh?”

  He has a lot of German blood. He grew up in California. He has facial hair. The only person I know who owns his own 7-Eleven.

  We pull the dead dog from the red bag and it is not what I bargained for. She looks tiny and curled, looks asleep, young again. I think of her two days before, running like crazy in the Elbow River, fetching a tooth-torn stick from the island breaks and grasses, wanting us to throw it again and again. I killed her by throwing too many sticks, by pleasing her. Pleasure’s price: Yesterday morning she couldn’t get up; her hips seized. Now her eyes are closed and her mouth slightly twisted after the polished steel table and final long needle at the 14th Street vet.

  Shirt Is Blue is tangling her old chain collar around her neck.

  “Leave the collar off,” I ask, remembering childhood history tales of blond soldiers executing and burying Indians with their hands bound, souring the afterlife; it might be the same with dog collars, this mortal coil.

  “Just toss it in maybe.” Maybe is a very popular word with us.

  Should we break up? Maybe. Order pizza? Maybe.

  “Okay, I’ll just toss it in,” assents Shirt Is Blue, and he places her gnashed stick as well in the hole under the trees. He has big hands. He holds the dog up like a folded lamb. The ceremony seems a last minute mishmash of Roman Catholic rites and native mythology and all-purpose generic superstition.

  Shirt Is Blue drops her body down from this limbo and into the mountain and her eyes and mouth open suddenly, alive with the motion, really looking alive, as if Ubo sees what is right below in the sandy mountain and I expect the dog to stagger up one more time, wanting insanely to chase her damn stick, not to lie in the wet hole under the alpine trees but she’s still quite dead and I’m not going to weep but do and walk away to sit on a rock by a cliff, whispering poor Ubo, poor Ubo, over and over as small rocks click down upon her. My idea, the rocks, a layer to keep wild creatures from digging her flesh up, but right now I am hating the poolball sound. This dog’s not even mine and I’m weeping on the rocks.

  Why don’t I care as much about what I’m doing to the Intended? To people? Perhaps because they’re not dead yet. Who makes more demands?
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  The sun comes out a bit. We carve the dead dog’s name on a wet poplar and drink Polish cherry brandy from a wicker bottle. The brandy is terrible, tastes like fruity diesel. We swear to come back to this spot over and over. The dog is now running through a mountain. Shirt Is Blue’s precise rallies look like store-boughts.

  In the 1960s I dug up my grandfather’s dog six years after it died just to see it. Still bits of fur on the dull skull, a shock to my hands. There was no lower jaw. To this favour we must come. Now we go back to our All Season radials, the Texas gates a brief huge noise under us and then home’s white door, or hormonal temples on Electric Avenue, Happy Hour, where seldom is heard a discouraging word.

  Electric Avenue. Like a fish eating trouble, you have a few drinks. Later that evening, two Cowtown pseudo-bikers jump at you with a bright orange extension cord, type I run a stuttering mower on, but now full of evil; they wish to wrap it around my neck, pull me like a kite. They want a pound of flesh. I’m trying to get this old car door open, crank over someone else’s huge Chrysler. Brown dust on the windshield cleared by wipers as a cavalry boot cruises in at my head. I cradle this boot and drop the dusty Chrysler into gear, give it some gas just as the other guy’s knife opens my thigh.

  Earlier I was sensitive about a dead dog. Now this. Who are these citizens in ‘70s footwear trying to launch me into the afterlife? A husband? Dealers? Thrill-seekers? Sales reps?

  The car lurches and jumps and I’m still holding one man’s foot, dragging this man’s head bump bump bump like Winnie the Pooh on the pavement. I accelerate, then brake hard and said second joker with knife slams into the Chrysler’s open door, and I rock the dusty door back hard into his kidneys or thereabouts, knock his blade to the ground. Kick him away with both feet. I’m losing perspective. I got them and I hope they’re goners meeting designer death in busted cranium where visions of créole zeppelins float and yaw past my leg in all sorts of blood. I actually try to back over them in the huge car but with little luck in the steering department. I’m not used to it. Fenders everywhere.