We are walking in Seattle, ironing things out for the zillionth time. Why is there matrimony? I don’t get it.
Listen, I say. Listen.
Well, tell your grandmother to butt out, she says.
Hey don’t talk to me about family; your family wins Rudeness of the Month contest hands down. Between your aunt and your cousin I’ve got a guaranteed first class ticket to politeness heaven.
Don’t shout at me, she says.
I’M NOT SHOUTING! I shout.
Please don’t shout at me, she says semi-tragically.
Listen, I say.
She doesn’t listen.
I am walking in Seattle with my Intended. A black in Pioneer Square, a handsome man with a peanut-shaped skull says to us, I turned their waters into blood. I’m not some ofay car-waxing shyster curber, right? The wicked lay a snare for me, right? And who are you?
I’m a honky, I say. The Intended rolls her eyes. This isn’t Mr. Rogers’ neighbourhood, she says.
No. You a crazy mothafuck, off and die, off and die! Gonna rock his world . . . the wicked lay a snare.
There is some tension but he wanders off muttering stage rap.
A man by the mission loads dead dogfish into a station wagon.
There ought to be lessons, more specific maps, I think.
Now an Indian wants to talk. Everyone wants to talk to us tonight. The minorities are restless. What the hell, we’re not ironing anything out. We’re adding zany new wrinkles. A new white-bread sitcom: Zany Antics! Ha! Let’s go to the Regal Beagle! Bring on Don Knotts.
“You’re a nice couple,” he says. “You got a car? I could use a car. I had a tank in Korea, what have I got now? I’m a veteran, served my country, saved you guys from the Red Chinese hordes. In Korea I had a tank. I got out of the army, not prison, the north, people are shit what I think.”
We duck into the freak scene Frontier Room. Low black ceiling, semi-punk staff, Belltown beatniks, stevedores in neo-psychedelia staggering under Rainier waterfalls and a band covering Velvet Underground drone.
Gimme a Red Hook, orders a man happily.
Sorry, not tonight, Seadomo.
Oh, he says very civilly. Sorry, I got too drunk I guess, bye!
We are pleased to see such reasonable behaviour. The night is full of kind surprises; my fight with the Intended is forgotten. The band is great. The jukebox is great. The wheat beer is great. We smile and wonder, What sort of name is Seadomo?
Seattle is a good city to drink in, I think, affectionately. In the dockyard below, a huge gantry crane creeps on rubber toward a Taiwanese container ship. I love Seattle. Soon I’ll be cut, traded, waived, made future considerations, whatever. No problem!
Then the handsome man with the weird lines from the bible and the peanut skull waltzes in.
“He kills their fish. He commands; the flies come in swarms. The wicked lay a snare. See how good and pleasant. Off and die, off and die.” But him and Seadomo join up, arm wrestle, shake hands solemnly and exit together calling to the bar, “Get a life.”
My Intended and I both order Rolling Rock. Bobby DeNiro says it’s good beer in The Deer Hunter. I like that part. Tiny 7 oz. bottles like in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, a link to my rotten old east coast teams, when there were more good breweries, when I had all my wild hair and canines, before I met the Intended, before I met Waitress X. Strange how nostalgia works things over and then we’re looking at it like a B-movie with someone else starring, someone with no nuances. Is that me?
We didn’t make the playoffs. The organist plays “Three Blind Mice” to mock the referees. Back once again to Alberta; always leaving strange cities in the spring, like a student. From the red ales and industrial strength coffees of Seattle we gun across Snohomish county, the plateau, channeled scab-land, my pale souped-up car flying through floods and tumbleweed, the Palouse country’s petrified flow of volcanic rock, where the sky has no colour over rimrose trees and there are no trees. When you see them they are black spikes; lie down in grain and right above you is huge sky with a woman’s warm face in it.
My Intended’s eyes are sensitive to light so she has to wear sunglasses a lot. She has a pawnshop leather jacket from Calgary. She looks tough but she’s not.
In a state forest I have to tie the muffler on but the rope keeps burning off. I lie on the highway trying to fix the muffler, scorching my hand while big 18-wheelers crash past, two inches from my limbs. A brand new muffler too.
At dusk we finally cross the Sun River near Great Falls, Montana, J.J. Hill’s city; stop in the Cowboy’s Bar, reel the drinks in like fish. Always gunning back to Alberta in the spring. Light moves only horizontally, like the Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. We briefly race a train, a face. We are true. We get lost on the new exits and drive by the Montana Deaf and Blind School, where we should all go, the Malmstrom airbase (Maelstrom? wonders my Intended), the Anaconda Mining Co., people who may or may not know their ass from a hole in the ground but they own the biggest hole in the ground in the world over there in Butte. Butte is great on St. Patrick’s Day. A thousand bars. Too bad the aquifier is turning into battery acid.
Getting the spins, she mutters.
That’ll be your birthday present, I say.
The Intended is lovely and goes to sleep in our car, far horizon the colour of raw steak, everyone out watching the western sky as if it owes them a prearranged mortgage payment. Then stars and storms running off the motel roof in the middle of the night. As usual I stay up too late. I don’t want to sleep. Elvis Costello is on cable, covering an old Animals tune, “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” I feel maybe I’m hallucinating the video, that out here in the Empty Quarter the airwaves are playing games, smashing together orphaned melodies and images.
A meal and drinks in Club Cigar, downtown Great Falls.
“Can we use your VISA card? I better give my card a rest.”
Out in the chalky land north of the Missouri River, on the mysterious empty superhighway in the middle of nowhere, we see a chopper lean slightly, a metal head tilting, puzzled; the chopper lifts its tail then falls into its own smoke, tits up, old pal flame waiting until called by chemistry. Another lost pilot. My car horn honks at them like an accordion on full tilt Doppler Effect.
“What are you accomplishing? Trying to warn them? I’m sure they know there’s some trouble.”
Cowboys in The Cowboy’s Bar told us the lonely freeway is for when they have to invade Canada. It does lead north right to the border, the 49th parallel.
“You think maybe those in the chopper survive?”
“I hope so.”
We’re trying to get happy, lighten up a little. We wheel north on Boodegger Road towards the Alberta border where a fortune in Prohibition booze came down in big sedans with no seats; we rattle past Shelby, Montana’s ancient empty cathouses and Burlington Northern rail yards; and we hang a left on the Highline, U.S. Highway 2, past the wind beaten site of Jack Dempsey’s 1923 bout with Tommy Gibbons for the heavyweight championship of the world. Some states had banned boxing; so in other states people would pay through the nose for a little bloodsport thrill. Shelby shelled out, hammering together a 40,000 seat wooden stadium for the Manassa Mauler, then selling less than 2,000 tickets. The locals, hoping to cash in, lost their shorts. Doc Kearns, Jack Dempsey’s manager, exited to the east clutching $250,000 in cash, the tail of the wood and iron train calmly shrinking, back to the big time, more of the sweet science.
“What day was that it said? Really July 4th?”
“This was the 4th of July. Three local banks closed their doors. Failed. Everyone’s money gone.”
We beat it due west on the Highline to Cutbank, Montana, pop. several, a nice little town with a good bartender Sherry there in the Winner’s Circle.
“Well what the hell they do—shut down Canada!?” Sherry bellows as we walk in the bar. Say hi to her if you’re there. We eat catfish and chicken and later we dance. I can never dan
ce when I’m sober. The band from Havre, Montana, east on the Highline, has a midget drummer. I think he’s the leader. I’ve seen him play here before. They do some fast rockabilly and we try crazy dance steps. The locals two-step or politely shimmy, watching out for us ugly city slickers. A good motel too, The Parkway, right across the main drag. Nice people, always trying to give us kittens. I like this part of the country.
We eat huge greasy breakfasts in the Big Sky Café. This becomes our code word for hangover:
How are you today?
Oh, I’m in the Big Sky Café.
In the motel bathroom my Intended brushes her teeth, calling at me with a foaming mouth: “Brush your teeth before I pack up.”
We pull out of town after stocking up on string cheese and Rolling Rock, Kinks on the tapedeck: “So tired, tired of waiting . . . .”
Just past Cutbank the Rockies glow like washed bones, pulling you to the Hanging Gardens, the Going-To-The-Sun Highway, a gorgeous W.P.A. project from the Depression.
I always feel at home in this bleak beautiful border country, rattling along the two-lane twists flanked with white crosses for those who didn’t make the corner, those who rolled the Buick and flew through the glass. Some crosses are weathered, some have new flowers. Each deadly curve has its intimate cluster of white crosses: a sister, a cousin, the native basketball team. Do we learn? I fly over a rise at 80 in a 50 zone and there’s a state trooper, but he just motions, Slow down, and I do slow down, feeling charmed. No ticket, no physics lesson.
This is haunted Indian land: Blackfoot and Crow. A haunted windswept corner of the universe. Eroded coulees of dinosaur bones and dinosaur eggs. Towering buffalo jumps. No fences and the charcoal sky seems shadowed and grainy and so much closer to the hilltops. An inch of light sky. Strange cartoonish roads run over these Indian hills—we end up perched on spooky hilltops higher than the telephone wires, looking down at them below the car door, then we plunge into the hollows and the wires rear above us. This is a troubled, spooky corner of Montana, fallen between mountains and plains. Everything’s crooked and the scale is all wrong. It occurs to me in the wheat and willow and weird Thomas Hart Benson hills west of Browning and Kiowa that American border towns, say Havre, Sweetgrass, Cutbank, Eureka, Kalispell, or Port Angeles, serve some of the same function Mexican border towns do for roving raving Texans.
I explain my theory to my Intended, that we roll south, when we feel the urge, crossing the border to blow off steam and blow some money. I know this is not an original thought. But the irony: up here it’s Canada that has the big cities, the clout, the lonesome travellers itching with disposable income, and here America is the forgotten backwater. There are few farms or towns or people.
Another point: this is a different nation but I feel closer to it than to say Ottawa or Toronto and I bet a loonie the locals feel the same: Montana is more like Alberta than it is like NYC. We never closed any of their banks, we never screwed them on water or timber or the rails.
“We just play at our role of Ugly Cheesehead, trashing their town a bit on Canada Day weekend. Nothing serious.”
My Intended reminds me we are not universally loved here. In these spooked hills a Canadian murdered two locals, Harvey Mad Man and Thomas Running Rabbit. He met them in a bar we know and he shot them in the same woods we drive through.
She says, “The state of Montana has the Canadian guy killing time on death row right this moment.”
We enter Glacier Park and head straight north at St. Mary Lodge.
At the Babb Bar a native keeps calling me Boss, wants to fight me, to take on the white race. Everyone wants to fight. I don’t want to fight anymore, I’m sick of fighting.
We leave our beers unfinished and wearily make our Customs declarations at the windblown Port of Chief Mountain. Hi ya’ll.
The stuttering border guards, young and pimply, seem unlikely confessors. Where have you wandered, they wish to know, are there secrets in what you carry?
Even to lie is to fight. I tell them I have no secrets, nothing at all to hide.
CHAPTER 35
Why Struggle?
All summer Waitress X refused to go into my cabin bedroom or anywhere near the condo.
“I did that once. We were playing baseball right by and he convinced me I could go in and use the bathroom. I snooped around their apartment, saw their life together and stopped seeing him. Broke it off right then.” Perversely, I forced her through the same, to prove something, that I’m different, have a stronger hold. But I was no better; it worked out the same. Everyone’s a winner.
Maybe a long man’s shirt worn as a mini with a wide belt slung low, the shirt displaying her legs. Anything Waitress X wore could be taken off in seconds. I lay down with her on impulse, thinking, here’s a place my demons can’t follow and she says if he finds out, we’re dead, he’ll kill no kidding. I want to live with her but pity her boyfriend, out drinking and gambling with his jock friends, wondering what the hell she is up to now, even now, very now.
I’m not as rotten as you think, she kept telling me, but I didn’t believe her until it was too late to tell her. Now I’ll never be able to tell her. I can’t tell a soul.
Is your father grey, Waitress X once asked. My father is dying. And I put out a man’s eye when I shot at the net, when I did what I was supposed to do. We were on the same team: does that make it worse?
The forward’s wife looked Italian; I saw her that night at the hospital. I said I was sorry. She said nothing. I mentioned the stick, someone else’s weird curve, didn’t mean to, etc. She did not hear.
What is it you seek? she finally said. Could I give her the eye back? She did not wish to be rude but she did not want to let me off the hook just yet. I don’t blame her. I wanted to be seen as a nice guy, to be forgiven faster, to microwave forgiveness.
A magazine ad asks the elderly, the infirm, Why Struggle With Stairs? Ride In Comfort. . . On A Wecolator. The ad shows a happy geriatric in a seat, being whisked up their home stairway. Sometimes I crave some mental equivalent of a Wecolator, this electric chair that moves you. Waitress X’s long, long back below me was a contour map I wished to follow home while cats courted on the cat-haunted fences. Where do they go when it gets 36 below?
Every woman I have been with is a lesson: the lesson is, I will regret leaving her, or I will regret staying. When she swings that blind slender pool cue, does she love me more than when she doesn’t swing it?
One winter night Wayne Gretzky was motoring a couple of us around town in his gold Italian sports car with his famous name on the plates. The City Police pulled us over and made Gretz change the plates; they were fake, made of cardboard. You’re young, you’re in a frozen northern city, you’re tearing up the scoring race, but still, why would you want to draw more attention to yourself? Why would you want cardboard licence plates?
Sometimes I want to be invisible, be called Bub, be bought a Pabst Blue Ribbon, to compromise, to try the Special of the Day, putter in the yard. To not be on top of the Zeitgeist. But I know that life would last about ten seconds.
CHAPTER 36
The East Slope of the Rockies
My rifle sends a narrow little something, its special metal line of sunlight. Light doesn’t age. I’m down in a grabben where the earth has fallen, faults forming a sort of walled arena. I descend, trailing a deer shot in the lungs. Goldeneye and harlequin ducks rise, follow a fast stream uphill, flying right on top of the brush, a whistling sound leaving to lakes and fells further over, to blue trees, where I walk searching, where my future wife won’t talk to me, where my Ex-Wife will. The ex knows you better than the current.
Thanks for driving, Kathy said in her truck, her eyes red. Her red horse is dead in the back. I can’t find the deer. Did I shoot her horse? I don’t ask how it died, preferring not to risk that knowledge.
I sneezed and my back seized up during the harmonic convergence. I have discovered something else. While I was on the road, Neon moved into my Ex-Wi
fe’s farm house above the lake. I will try to imagine his habits among her whitewashed rooms and dark Tudor halls and lawyers’ bookcases, Neon springing blithely up those creaking fir stairs under the leaky skylight I put in. Are you the jealous type?
Lots of people, my Ex-Wife said to me, would give anything to be a has-been.
Well thanks loads. Thanks so much. Just what I need.
Hoo boy, says Shirt Is Blue, peering gleefully at his plate in the Chez Jethro Café, Need drugs to eat all this.
“See—jukeboxes at each table. At-mo-sphere. That’s what this place has.”
They plug “The Ballad of Wendel Clark.”
“Any smokes?”
“All I’ve got is these Ultra Lights, have to smoke three at once.”
They do, three white cigarettes in each mouth.
“I’m getting another beer,” I say. “Big Rock. Not this chemical beer.”
“You drink too much,” Kathy says. “We can’t keep up. Not everyone has your iron constitution.”
“Well, I’m a social drinker,” I say.
“Don’t you mean anti-social drinker!”
“Socialist drinker?”
“You say tomato, I say porcupine.”
“Black Russian? That some kind of Com-nist drink?” Shirt Is Blue faking a bad southern accent, which irritates me. Like Monty Python imitations in high school.
Shirt Is Blue says, “Tell me bub, why do women wear all that makeup? These people painting their eyelids green? Who we impressing? Martians? I’m telling girls that this war paint is not as attractive to men as they might think. I’ve got some good primer, couple coats. And while I’m on the subject, stop that talking during the movie. You’re driving me crazy. I have even composed a letter to the editor on this topic. Did you hear Oprah got busted at the airport? They looked under her skirt and found thirty-five pounds of crack.”
Salvage King, Ya! Page 16
