Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Little shows as clearly the feudal nature of the game as the player traded for a bus. Jake Milford was traded for two nets but at least later he had his own team. Eddie Shore of course complained about the nets. You tell me what goes through people’s heads.

  Our coach said to a reporter, “You try to put the smart guys at centre and the bozos on wing.” Doubtless, the wingers were thrilled to read this over their bacon and eggs.

  Not long ago, in a cavernous 3-level bar in Montreal I saw Chris Nilan drinking beer by himself in a dark corner, quiet, smoking like crazy. John Kordic used to sit off by himself, a shy drugged puzzle. Turns out Kordic went to my high school in Edmonton. Years after I did. At the Montreal nightclub some jock wannabes were goading Chelios and Ludwig, wanting to fight any of them, any of us. We ignored them. Chelios went off somewhere upstairs to avoid the idiots. Give him credit: he doesn’t always fight. Dick Duff was upstairs talking old times with Dick Diver. Dobozy and I walked over to say hi to Nilan. Dobozy put his hand out in a soul shake. In a Boston accent, Nilan said, “Don’t shake hands like a nigger.”

  Kathy walks down the road, drops by the cabin for a swim.

  “You never use the phone?” I ask. “I believe I bought you a deluxe model at one point. It had memory.”

  “I don’t like it,” she says. Maybe she suspects me of something and is checking up. Her phone has memory, brain cells pulsing, red light in a rectangle.

  She’s here because she knows me, because we used to be married and have always lived down the road from each other, and perhaps because now I’m engaged to another. Kathy pulls her clamdiggers off but leaves her underwear on. I avoid thinking how they’ll look in the water, like wet Kleenex clinging on her body. Sometimes with her cheekbones it’s like you can see her skull. She’s lit up. There is some energy there but we don’t pursue it. Not right now. I’m being faithful to a mistress.

  Hard chemical light on the lake blinds me as boats cross, peering down for the plane, dragging for bodies, their orange flotation jackets visible from my sundeck. They found a chequebook floating, are checking the name against the passenger list.

  Barefoot, Kathy and I tiptoe down the steep path, holding each other up. My former wife pulls her T-shirt off. Muscles and flesh. She is so pale in the water: a trendy drowned look. Ophelia down on the farm, working on a big garden under an umbrella. Together we breast-stroke to the raft, twenty yards from shore but still somehow webbed by the same old spiders, rocking on the water, waiting for what sustains them to come on wings.

  Waitress X picks up the jacket I wear a lot, puts it to her face.

  “This smells of you—your musk,” she says.

  I force my eyes from her. I like her too much. It makes me uncomfortable, worried, wary.

  “Do you do steroids?” She looks concerned, punitive.

  “I can’t stand needles. You do steroids?”

  “Very funny. I do Jane Fonda.”

  Waitress X is always getting flowers at work so I refuse to give her any though I would like to. I don’t want to be like all the others. But by liking her I am exactly like the others.

  “What are you staring at? What are you thinking?” This is what we ask each other at first. What should we do? we ask each other. It’s not a trick question.

  They’re all trick questions, she tells me.

  What’s with you now, one asks the other a little later on.

  Now? What do you mean NOW?! the other may reply.

  Waitress X is always having flowers pushed upon her. I will give her the shirt off my back.

  Keep your shirt on, hollers my Intended when I’m in a rush. Keep your shirt on.

  I separate my shirts, our laundry: black and white together in one load, clothes manufactured in Communist countries in a second load. A little extra effort like this can make all the difference!

  North is not due north, the poles have shifted, continents pulled on strings. What can be relied on then? The road is both an exit and an entrance. All of us shifted on strings. No strings? says Waitress X. There are always strings. In the Caffe Fur I’m waiting for the waitress to dial seven numbers for I can’t use my own phone. She’s at her French lesson. Her favourite book is The Little Prince and she tests men on whether they like it. I don’t care for the book. A bad sign. Should I tell her I prefer Machiavelli’s version? No. Clam up. Clam up for once.

  Great bees buzz my trees with their parts laced and jade. Black flowers, plum light spreading in the broken garage window. I’m going to work on my 1959 Volvo’s Weber carbs. The mix. Putting the two in balance. I can never get it right on my own. My ‘59 Volvo is not one of those cold boxes Sweden cranks out now. It handles like a truck but it has old soul and great Jesus fenders and a fastback humpback, like some funky 1940s monster Bogart drives in High Sierra or The Big Sleep.

  My Intended works a good job downtown 9 to 5.1 don’t really know what she does. I do and I don’t. She works with video, contacts, contracts, with the future. I can tan lazily all day, later my dark arm across her white ass. Police sirens over and over below. I try her rougher because of Waitress X. She likes it rougher. The covers fall on her tiny dog. She comes twice. I feel selfish with Waitress X; tearing our pleasures is always too fast, I worry who will show up at the porch or empty pastel house or tiny car seat or snotty museum exhibit. Do the neighbours know? This is not the way to build something solid. Unless solid is over-rated?

  Every weekend I feel I won’t see her again, try to forget. She meets me at the deserted show-home, comes in from waiting tables. She’s between shifts: “So you did nothing all day?” It’s stormy, I haven’t gone out. I’m happy to wait for her, to wait on her like a waitress. She tells me her boyfriend’s buddy saw her with Frederico, told him she was with some “Italian stud.” Eyes everywhere. He suspects the wrong guy. We all do. Trees bend their crowns, aspens labour in the wind. I could stop seeing her sometime in the future; that seems easy enough, the future. But I can’t stop just now, not right this minute. Planes pass, slow arrows, one after another overhead, then easing to earth north of the city, landing where they are supposed to belong, where we expect them.

  In a strange reversal, I am guilty at first, I feel badly but am driven to her. She was mad at her boyfriend. She said to me, I don’t feel guilty, you shouldn’t. Revenge? I wondered. Is Waitress X using me to get back at her boyfriend, to cause trouble? Then she starts feeling guilty: her boyfriend is suspicious, she’s learned more about the Intended from talking with me. I’m not the mysterious stranger anymore. No more wondering what he is like. When I get closer to the idea of leaving the Intended and actually taking up with Waitress X, she backs away, nipples like dark eyes. We have no future; we can’t even go to a movie at night. She is the present and she wants to just be the present.

  My Intended is pale as her open shirt, one knee up, her chin pensively resting on it, her head bowed slightly in a box of white light from the bedroom window. I realize she’s wearing a pair of my boxers and one of my shirts. She is like this with food also, always sipping what is in my glass, taking a bite from my sandwich.

  As a child I never really thought about it, says my Intended, but why was it always women at the church, praying for something, shuffling their shopping bags, lighting a votive candle, dropping a few coins in the tin box? I don’t think I ever saw a guy doing that. Why was it always a woman?

  Maybe the guys had given up on the system. Maybe the women were still hoping.

  Maybe the guys had everything they needed, she says. Maybe their prayers had already been answered.

  Yeah I’m sure you’re right, I say sarcastically, and she dings me, just enough of a slap to send a brisk tactile message. The exact message I’m not sure of. Avoid sarcasm? Avoid religion?

  I have a very decent life right now with my Intended. I stay up late with ancient headphones on, reading on the comfy purple sofa, and I sleep in late, waking at eleven in a queen size bed. This is what emigrés dream of, what wetbacks die in the
desert for. Why am I so ready to toss it?

  My Intended and I are to be married next year, perhaps in Ireland, the Aran Islands or the Dingle Peninsula. We debate top hats, gormless jodhpurs, giant white horses, an airy tent in an ancestral meadow, wedding photographs in the castle that Cromwell toppled, and a smart drop of poteen or Guinness. Folding the future into the past, blending two people, like different buckets of paint, until it’s impossible to tell them apart.

  “Is this enough lettuce for six people?” she asks. Neon and some of his artsy crowd are coming over for an artsy snack.

  This lettuce question seems utterly unanswerable to me.

  “No,” I say quickly, because I know I’ll never decide if I think about it.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  How do you judge what is enough?

  To the west trucks work the mountain passes, where new rivers race and our favoured dogs are buried; visible heat hangs off the air brakes, wired drivers shifting down frantically until they finally run out of gears.

  CHAPTER 9

  Exit Pursued By Bear

  We’re hunting in honeyed light, moving inside a circle of mountains where Pre-Cambrian valleys eat into each other under the caves and treed ridges. “You think a cougar killed it?” asks Neon. “Maybe we’ll see a cougar. Let’s go back and get my camera.”

  We’ve been walking the eastern slopes and whale-shaped foothills of Beauty Creek; Neon and an ex-player from the Calgary Flames fan out ahead of me while I study their ears, while I think about Waitress X’s slow voice and the low sound of my father’s voice, for I have just learned my father’s liver is cancerous, a tumour laid like a butterfly over three of four sections. There’s no telling how long he has, how long our family has. It’ll be like a grin with one tooth gone. We stumble onto an elk, dead under a cliff. Parts are missing. If a cougar did it, Neon definitely wants his zoom lens, wants a good shot of the cat. This light is perfect, he says, so we walk back down to the red 4 × 4 to grab Neon’s Russian camera, then climb once more uphill to the kill, our rifles loaded just in case.

  Weird noises rise now in the pretty alpine meadow: yellow wildflowers, scarlet rosehips, a butter-coloured grizzly feeding on the elk’s hindquarters, snapping out bits and shaking its head. Grizzlies are trouble if you disturb them at a kill. We back up pronto as the grizzly rears on dark legs, making more strange noises, jaw doing something I’ve never seen before, its flat nose up sniffing for us.

  And then it charges, galloping faster than I’ve seen any creature run, a cross between a horse and a wild dog at full bore, crazy grace and a hump of muscle like a ball.

  We cannot get away and start alternating shots. Metal hits it. I shoot, Neon shoots, going for the chest, trying to break down the shoulders. The other guy shoots, our guns noisy, echoing as percussion. Off the stunted pines, the cliff, a black powder smell sharp up my nose.

  I don’t bother with the grizzly’s head, its skull is too thick; I keep my shots low. The bear’s tiny eyes seem half crossed, teeth snapping.

  Shots hit the ragged fur like ink, bloodspots blooming deep in the thick fall coat, but the grizzly won’t go down, it wants to get at us. I shoot, he shoots; gun butt killing my shoulder, the bear still charging with these weird canine noises, big obvious holes in it but charging, and I’m thinking now of five claws mauling my eyes, my vulnerable liver, yellow teeth clamping my skull like a soft apple.

  We blast away; this part seems to go on forever. One of the grizzly’s legs is clearly ruined but it’s still charging. And then the bear staggers and slumps on its huge face, slides, then tumbles downhill right past us and it’s over, dark gums and scarred ears stopping a couple yards beyond the toe of my boot.

  My ears ring, I’m deaf and stunned. The grizzly’s ears remind me of a cat’s; they’re chewed up at the edges. The bear stinks and its face seems two feet across. Its curving incisors, the colour of a daylight moon, are long, long as my fingers.

  In these sesame golden mountains where our blonde grizzly lies twitching, Marilyn Monroe once asked my father to take a snapshot of her and Joe DiMaggio. Jolting Joe and Marilyn were sitting on a railing, looking at Mt. Edith Cavell and Honeymoon Lake. This is before Jolting Joe’s temper, before he hired the detective to follow her. There is a gap between his front teeth. There are peaks and satellite peaks, older rocks thrust over new.

  “That prick wouldn’t drop,” Neon says, “shot that prick six times, prick didn’t know it was dead.” The sky comes back in focus, birds return to their flowers’ tiny hearts and organs.

  Neon keeps talking, pacing, calling the grizzly names. Everything I do seems at the wrong shutter speed, and the bear is shrinking into autumn’s earth and yellowed grass, sienna spruce needles and synclinal rock. One shot in my chamber, none in Neon’s rifle. If we’d been one yard closer it would have hit us, eaten us. It didn’t know it was dead. It misunderstood.

  I have that sense of adrenaline and admiration and failure you feel after a fight with someone you like, someone you find had a bum hand or shoulder. I feel obscene. I have to sit on the ground while Neon takes dozens of pictures, a photo opportunity, the Russian camera’s antique motor growling like a nest of wasps. I believe polar bears’ livers are poisonous; I wonder if it’s the same with grizzly livers? Who will get the scarred coat? The paws? Sometimes you find a dead bear and that’s all that’s chopped off: the hands and feet. A delicacy for some.

  Marilyn Monroe was filming River of No Return between Jasper and Banff. In the movie she plays a saloon singer with red shoes and a fall in her hair. Joe hates Hollywood, with good reason. Robert Mitchum is in the picture. It’s a bad movie: Otto Preminger must have owed someone.

  I caught it once on Siesta Cinema on Channel 3, back when there were only two channels. I remember she posed dramatically on a raft as it swept down a seething river and those pesky natives tore at her blouse. She disliked these kinds of scripts but the crew adored her. Did they use a double on the distant shots? Fake scenery? Is this what would drive her to dye her hair the colour of honey? To make it so much fake scenery? The press was not allowed near her. My father was the only person who didn’t know who the blonde woman was. They were parked in a viewpoint west of the highway, little more than a dirt track in the 1950s. My father stood tall and polite in a white cotton suitcoat, a relic of Oxford and the war years in Ceylon with the Royal Navy.

  “Would you be so kind ... ?” Marilyn asks, not finishing her sentence.

  My mother does not approve; Joe and Marilyn are not yet married and though there is a pretense of separate hotels, my mother believes Joe is sneaking over to Marilyn’s room at Becker’s Bungalows or Jasper Park Lodge. There are stories of wild parties and fights and evictions, of sour jealousy and injury and shooting delays.

  My mother’s bible says for women to adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array. The river is braided: on its gravel bed it separates and rejoins, separates and rejoins, over and over as the river moves toward the railroad yards of Jasper, and the Arctic Ocean.

  My father took two pictures and put the small camera back in Marilyn’s hand. Don’t you know who that was, they said, don’t you know? It didn’t matter to him who they were. They were just people. Joe and Marilyn looked childishly happy, teeth evident. A scarf over her hair, dark glasses in her hand. The earth is fairly new, the future bright and harmless as mountains, sordid affairs banished, behind us. I wonder now if my father ever had an affair; did he ever have his Waitress X? My father converted from Church of England to Catholicism to marry my mother, a war bride, to start a family. Back then everyone would go see the bears feed at the dump. They built bleachers. The bears open and close their mouths. Late in the day the light is perfect, like reddish oxide and down-folded quartzite. Marilyn Monroe talks to my father, sleeps with Joe DiMaggio, and makes her bad movie.

  Late in the day you park your huge American car on the tender alpine p
lants and climb into the bleachers set up by the park rangers. My father drove a tiny Ford Prefect. All of us took our places. All of us, Marilyn Monroe, my father, me, two years old and asleep, will dwell in this light forever. Barbiturates and detectives, carcinomas and my motorcycle crash wait in different rooms down the hall. Like the grizzly I will shoot in these mountains, we don’t know yet that we’re dead. The bears file in like a vaudeville troupe. All the men wear charcoal hats. My father never wears a hat.

  The bears put on a show by simply showing up and eating our garbage, like sin eaters; Joe and Marilyn put on a show, smiling like shy honeymooners, just ordinary folks. The crowd eats it up. A man approaches with a Brownie box camera but he doesn’t want Marilyn; he wants a bear. His blond child has honey placed on his palm, a sweet photo opportunity. Just in case there’s trouble he has a pistol tucked in his baggy wool pants. You’re not supposed to have a gun in the park. The bears work their jaws peacefully, hunched in a private circle like a family playing Scrabble. When they are born they weigh half a pound. The father pushes his child. Go on, the father says, go on. Then the bears turn.

  CHAPTER 10

  I Will Drive a School Bus

  Waitress X says all’s fair in love and real estate. She says, One abandons the accordion, settles for questionable companions. What if you love a woman solely for her glowing eyes? Is it a sin? (They have prepared a net for my steps.) What if you would throw it away for her eyes? (My heart is fixed.) Her bow tie matches her eyes, drawing out prismatic colours. I don’t know her. How I want her. This is eating me from the fringes of my liver. I know nothing is enough. The eerie Montana highway, that one mountain off in solitude to the east—it is dear to me.

  Low cloud over the lake’s polite waves and skinny birch ride the glowing mist, our sky haired with ravens. I can’t see thirty feet. Loons holler as moths beat at my lit picture window and logging trucks gear down in the hills; it’s noisy at night in my cabin under the firmament. I have retired in a sense to the lake, to the cabin’s earthy smell, to ska and blue-beat and 1950s country and western on an ancient reel to reel, to cattle skulls and seashells nailed on the pine wall; I have retired to Salvage King Ya! to what is left me. I will drive a school bus, work at 7-Eleven, shovel coal into trucks, do Joe jobs, anything.