In the hospital Hello Walls echoes again on the radio.
In England, the reggae singer, born in Brixton, is told to go home. Mr. Singh, born in an affluent suburb of Toronto, is told to go back where he came from. The Maori scholar says it is time for eighteen million whites in Australia and New Zealand to go home. The Japanese-Canadians want reparation. The Métis and Cree profess love for shopping centres, investment property, lifestyles of the rich and famous. Perhaps I should look up Oliver Cromwell and ask for my plot of Irish bog back, rebuild my castle. We are all going home, Air Canada is having a seat sale.
With the aged bachelor uncles: respect, some polite shouting. Lots of sludge coffee and coffee cake and Camels or Chesterfields. They’re all moody, smart, great readers, but half-deaf and will never admit it. We mail money for hearing aids and they buy more lottery tickets or the Irish Sweepstakes. We hear what we want to hear.
He’s a jockey and he’s never ridden a horse?!
No, he’s never ridden this horse!
Five hundred bucks for a pair of sneakers!?
No, speakers, stereo speakers!
So you play hockey?
Yes sir, I play this Saturday night.
Oh. (A pause.) And when is it you play?
I said, Saturday night. . .
Now it’s Saturday night, waving to my favourite uncle in the crowd.
“Shoot! Shoot! We pay ya to hit the friggin’ net!” After our side has scored and we’re skating back slow and easy to centre for the face off: that looseness, grins, ready to do it again, tapping shin pads, the coach leaving you out on the ice for an extra shift. That was a good feeling. I shot a knuckler that went in the net off a guy’s head. Horseshoes some nights.
It’s way too easy to get used to losing, it does something small to you.
Speaking of losing, I hate things now without her, without youth, wheels, my right to mix it up, ambulate, penetrate; my inalienable right to walk with a Waitress X. I’m happy when driving a car and night is a thousand stars, a thousand stations; AM watts from Wyoming, Utah, Mexico. A horizon, valley sinks, massifs. Not this massive collection of skin mags in the hospital. The only consolation I wrest from the assembly line of naked Playmates: How unhappy these people will be in a decade or two. Wrinkled in bathroom steam and paw prints, they’re going to feel a lot like I do, like shell casings used too many times, like a shredded knee. You go a tiny bit off the straight and narrow. You hit the wall or you hit barbwire and then someone in white is turning the six bolts, someone is screwing on the dreaded halo.
CHAPTER 28
Do the Locomotion
The doomed coach touched my shoulder. Go. I jump the boards. The other team’s goon kept saying, “Choo ‘n’ me, choo ‘n’ me.” I thought this was a little overly dramatic but maybe it gave him an edge. The other team’s goon hit me and I dropped, half my face burning. I did the dead cat bounce. He had wrists like 4x4 posts, snake tattoos. Broken orbital bone or something in my cheek. My body said stay down, gravity said stay down, my Ex-Wife somewhere in TV land said stay down, Waitress X at a restaurant screen said please stay down please.
I got up. He popped me in the temple. I got my bell rung.
“Know where you are?” they ask.
I look around. “Yeah. The fucking minors.”
Where the others imagined the bus crawled to I don’t know. To some place they expected to get something. For me it crawled toward her—exclusively. But when the seal leaked oil we crawled very slow. When the headlights and electrical blew we taped big flashlights to each outside corner of the bus. The reaches opened before us and closed behind and I kept hearing the stupid galoot voice: you and me, you and me.
In Philadelphia our team bus stopped at a red light and kids trotted out with spray cans. Around Germantown grand stone mansions are gone to scum, filigree porches tilting, colonial pillars falling, nothing like them in Alberta. George Washington used to hang out here; now he’d get rolled, killed for his wooden teeth. Where the republic began it now unravels. At my uncle’s stop the train platform is burned, the lights smashed. My uncle has to use a tunnel to cross under the track. It’s absolutely dark as the lights are smashed out. A kid has hidden a newspaper machine there on its side. My uncle, 84, steps through the blind tunnel and walks his shin into the metal corner; he falls in pain, his Irish voice cursing, and he has to crawl out of the filthy tunnel. There’s a garbage strike, weird rabble hanging around, air conditioners on like constant helicopters. Is this our fate? All of us in our dotage, cursing where we live, unable to stand or understand what plays on TV or the radio, tripping over objects in the black tunnel, something maliciously placed in our way, gunfire, dark roving gangs, the old world seeming to shrink and fall around our ears. I worry Philly or L.A. is waiting for us no matter where we live. They’re just seeing it first at a few select theatres.
Monday’s mauve light goes on forever. Weather keeps changing over the land, piles up on mountain cusps and whaleback dunes and wrench faults. The weather spills onto the high plains a bit at a time, like out of a heavy bucket. Hail falls, then low cloud lies on the valley while above the peaks the sky moves in blue and orange streaks. A weird mix, like with the waitress, chalk and cheese, not right but exciting. I want a train to her brain, to meet in beauty and in blood; delaying her sleek underwear and slow hips, learning the tongue behind her teeth, careful in her slender throat. To move inside her is to live. I look out clean windows and jump from car to car, bed to bed, until I hit that final set of wheels going down slow, that final mattress, that final breath under the fourteen cow heads nailed to the cabin. Ten Hail Marys and ten How’s Yer Father. Waitress X is naked on my parents’ pale couch, seashells on a glass table, a whitewashed fireplace. Across town a tornado writhes. Her back, the long cinnamon path of her back. When I have finally written it off, a month and a half later, she phones out of the blue. She swears she called me dozens of times, even long distance from the coast, on her holiday. She says there was no answer, she says she hung up because a woman answered, she says any number of things, pushing the right buttons. I laugh. It’s funny, I can’t be mad at her. But my elation is followed by moodiness: she will put me through the wringer again and I am letting her. As I become older it seems less simple to pin blame. Before: that is wrong, and that is correct; she’s to blame or she’s a saint. Now I try and it swings back to me, partly my fault. Murk is operative as I walk to the Red Mango Grocery, for milk and the phone booth. I call Waitress X at her mother’s. The same suggestive voice lingers in the mother, a slow “Bye” with some promise inherent. In one week her daughter leaves to school down east. Diminuendo.
CHAPTER 29
33 Stolen Cars
As well as the occasional addict’s body, thirty-three stolen cars have been dumped around the lake roads this summer, stripped and chopped, then towed into Salvage King Ya! I can’t complain. They give me work, purpose. Repairs can be affected, good can come from bad. This is my new $1.49 philosophy.
The road to my cabin swerves south and east around a farm’s pocky hillock stamped and trodden by stone dumb cattle and a few witty pigs. You can read this one field: it says failure. Every clod, clump and lump of gumbo, every piece of wet straw and handful of wet mud possesses the same character; no other field in the water district looks quite so bad, none is as redolent of slow-motion penury and genteel hillbilly neglect. Farms a quarter-mile to the north have oil lease dividends, neat rows of silos, Norman Rockwell putting greens; seldom is heard a discouraging word. This rise by my lake has muck, ruts, broken trees, glacial boulders where buffalo scratched themselves, and a ruined Model ? with a wasp’s nest glued to the ratty upholstery. Something in me wants to own that hill, that torn up real estate. I could get Neon to do an artsy installation: two or three big crosses silhouetted on the crest.
For the first time (at least in this lifetime) I am collecting things. In the Salvage King Ya! yard I have a ‘53 Plymouth Belvedere hardtop, a ’38 Buick, a
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