CHAPTER 44
Cowboys Not Dancing
More horse trouble, more horse opera: My ex-wife Kathy is driving my truck with her Arab stallion in the back of the truck, its front leg broken in seventeen places. A morning breeze rises from the valley below, cool as the lake but I like the window down, my arm out of the truck, insects bounding off skin into a dust cloud, thinking of her in our old bed still in the old house and in that skin of the climbing year these fields black, spring seed walked across fields every year rising to the sun moving north and rain falling straight, or grain falling to hail or hell or blades, another dead winter, then between clods, that sheen, green life again, every moist spring, killing and lifting whirls of wheat the colour of her hair year after rolling year living so close to her, my seed in her once, but I can’t talk to her right now and think again of her favourite horse, the Arabian, broken, in the back; I say nothing, but I see her glare like a god out the window at redtail hawks over hay and Charolais in a balance of sun and rain and grass. Hubcaps nailed to a jackleg fence, wood ready to collapse and bargain with the earth.
Why me? Kathy thinks. The same old question. Why does everything happen to me? She looks, sees everything.
“The Big Guy In The Sky puzzles me,” Kathy says, “I haven’t had much luck with His mysterious ways. Would you term yourself an optimist? Why is my horse dead? Why now? Why do I have such problems with men? Why? Why? Not a clue, haven’t the foggiest. Why? No use asking that particular question. Little use asking any questions. Better yet, let’s pretend to ask questions.” I listen as she drifts through each traffic light, faster and faster, red or green, until we are near the slaughterhouse.
“Do you believe in anything? I believe in lots. In jet-lag for instance. Homemade beer. That stuff that kills carpenter ants and only costs $4.99. Is hot desire good or bad? I used to really be fond of men. And my horse. I had hopes. Nice ass. Good legs. Now? Now it’s like I’m a high rent cunt and no one can make the payments anymore. I’m in the window and I don’t move. I’m nailed to the spot.” She is near tears is what she is.
“Honey, where is this damn place?” she says.
“Turn left here, can’t you smell it?” A stench in the neighbourhood. Do they get used to it? I hope they get a break on the rent.
“You look great, you’re eminently fuckable,” I say in the wrong voice.
“Don’t make me laugh,” Kathy says. “This gets us nowhere, know what I mean?”
Is she on diet pills again? I still love every woman I’ve known, but I don’t tell them. Or I do and it drives them away.
“This high rent stuff,” I say, still trying. “Don’t talk that way.”
“Listen. Something is dead. My stupid goddamn stupid horse is dead.”
“It’s not dead yet.” Which is true but I wish the words were back in my mouth. The horse’s leg is broken in seventeen places. My ex-wife looks at me as if I am a complete idiot for about several thousand moments.
We drive. There are no coins in the fountain so to speak. There is a poachy meadow of Poland China pigs. First she goes too fast and then we’re going about 3 M.P.H. on a city byway.
Out of the blue Kathy says, The ref ejaculated him; I swear to God that’s what the ass on TV said, not ejected him but ejaculated him from the game.
You’re blocking traffic, I note politely.
Oh shut up—her favourite phrase.
I used to say she was good-looking, and Kathy would look embarrassed and say Shut up. I’d say a meal was good, Shut up she’d say. What a brain, I’d tell her during Jeopardy! Shut up, she’d say, bashful.
I have to learn to say shut up tactfully. As Kathy does.
Shut up, please.
Please shut up, honey.
Thank you for please shutting your big fucking trap.
Fermez la bouche s.v.p.
Years ago I was hanging out, killing time, lying low in Fort McLeod, a small town south and east of here—I was shooting pool with a young long-haired Blackfoot painter. Charlie Russell of all people is his favourite artist. Dry country but fields of mustard so yellow, it’s like Van Gogh on acid.
You have a big mouth, Indian, the cowboy said by the lit pool table, a big fat mouth. This is this cowboy’s version of shut up.
The Indian was Golden Gloves once. He beat the cowboy outside, quieted him, shut the cowboy up. The cowboy folded like a kid’s stroller and thought things over awhile, feeling he was a man more sinned against than sinning.
Imagine us all stuck inside a space ship. “Please shut up.”
“No, you shut up!”
Out you go, out the little hatch. Lost in space.
At the renderers my ex-wife and I wait and wait in the boneyard smell until the SPCA and the school children’s tour finally leaves. A backhoe bucket cradles a giant pig, a red monster in a posture of unwanted, violent death. I wonder if Pocklington, that puffed up meatpacker, owns a piece of this place. The man leads Kathy’s stallion inside. It’s the only horse she cares about. He holds a .22. He comes back in a minute and hands Kathy the empty halter.
Done, he says.
It’s their meat now: 70 cents a pound. It’s gone up, was 31 cents the last time I was here.
There’s a hot market for horsemeat on the Continent. They’re killing all the wild horses in these foothills for a few hundred dollars. (Win An All-Expense Paid Trip To Europe!) They shoot them, they run them down in trucks, all-terrain vehicles, or skidoos. Snares hang at neck level on the horses’ favourite trail, although it may be a few days before anyone gets around to checking the traps or the salt licks and fancy locking corrals. (Happy Trails!) One day you gallop around under the breezy ramparts of the Rockies and the next day you’re sausage in the City of Light.
Everywhere I wander they’re snuffing the last of the wild horses: Utah, Nevada, in the Cariboo, on the road to Bella Coola, where they compete with the domestic stock for precious pastures; on the military range around Suffield’s naked plains, where the army says they’re culling them for their own good; or here in the foothills west of Jawbone Lake, where my neighbours kill them for the equivalent of babysitting money. Kathy and I drive out of the glue factory air of the city.
Later she’s crying and I drive her the rest of the way, getting used to the soft feel of my own brakes again.
Once I could ... I touch Kathy’s shoulder, DON’T, she says as if I’m killing her.
“Don’twhat?”Isay.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. Whatever you’re going to do.” I guess I have heard vaguer warnings than this.
Just past the renderers is a rainbow I refuse to think on. We drive in circles but there’s no odometer so the miles don’t matter.
At the cabin I decide: work, effect repairs, salvage. Must fix that sinking driveway, that sinking feeling.
I dump a load of pit-run gravel, ten yards of black evil chunks and rocks. I shovel it hard and rake it flat, shovel and rake, sweat pouring from my eyes, my yellow shirt soaked to me. It’s not an ark but I am fixing things up. It’s therapy. I’m getting in touch with my inner child to make them hand over the proceeds of the paper route. My face says rictus then I see her strolling dusk’s grassy road. My ex-wife brings me lemonade in a metal pitcher, her confident walk back. I knew you’d be doing something, Kathy says, I just knew it. She knew. By the well the ground has also sunk. I shovel clay into the depression. I miss the desert, the bats at blossoms and blind cowboy dancers, the reliable mirages. The sodden lumps of grey clay make great smacking sounds when they land. I’m fixing nothing, RCAF jets wander past from Cold Lake. I will dig until this is finished; I’ll set up lights so I can see. See better. In the motel pool in the mountains I could only see my hands, the underside of the water an imperfect mirror; I failed to see my own face. “Oh no,” the man in the toupée said, adjusting his face, glad to help me on this one, “See, I have gambling money.”
I am drifting my spade into grey matter, digging metal into some h
uge brain under these pitiable poplars, waiting to find a horse skull’s eye sockets, a calcified memory, my separate reflections dangling on an endless convoy of stainless steel Airstreams.
PART 3
Eurotrash
Can we never extract the tapeworm of Europe
from the brain of our countrymen?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
CHAPTER 45
The Wrong Train
Too many times, and I admit this, this brain works in terms of grievous seminal c & w tunes: I’ve got a tiger by the tail, walking the floor over you, heartaches by the number, you’re a gonna change or I’m a gonna leave, dropkick me Jesus. . .
I float out over trees at night, work my Baycrest flannel sheets through wineglass elms in front of the childhood bungalow as lights of a crowded galaxy flash off and on like cheap rink lights, a faulty connection, sky opening, then black and green after-images of the Saskatchewan River hanging in my retina in arrested motion, in jumpy sleep.
My intended awakes and I’m asleep crashing through sock drawers. I’m moving the Elvis print from the wall. What’s wrong? she asks. The wiring, I tell her. Have to fix things. Have to fix things. Still asleep, I visit the bathroom, drift back to bed. Sock drawer still open in the morning, Elvis propped on the ground, or I wouldn’t have believed her.
Is everything all right? she asks. You know, I don’t think everything’s all right, she says. It’s obvious you don’t give a fuck about me.
That’s not true, I say.
She says, I think we should postpone things, take some time apart from each other. You don’t love me, I can’t trust you (Where does she get these ideas?), you shouldn’t even go out with women, you’re hurting me so much.
She cries and snaps all of her birth control pills out of the dial and throws the mess into the garbage.
Now I don’t have either of them, now I don’t have Waitress X or my Intended, but I agree to a split. O.K., can do. I have to fix things. I have to leave. I’ve exhausted things, I’ve exhausted this continent.
Having exhausted this continent I sign to play with a team in France, but I take a wrong turn, take the wrong train, in Paris, in the Gare De something and I am tossed off in Bordeaux near a big hotel. A wwii Wolf pack base is here somewhere. U-Boat crews and Wermacht soldiers took their leave in Biarritz. Near the centre of town I meet an Irish woman named Mary Flannery Mangan. We are both looking over a menu outside a tiny restaurant.
She says she is knackered but, yes, tea would be lovely. She thinks I’m American. Her hair is red. I like her accent.
That night we neck on a boat, on a body of water, her face the colour of blueprints. Lights on the water. It all gets Spanish, which is better than Paris. Paris is my fave candidate for the neutron bomb. Leave the pretty city standing but staff the place with amiable Iowans. I’ll take Moonies over Parisians. Parisians are too jumpy, never sure who is the latest enemy, who they must hate that week. As I well know, this takes some energy. Here in the south, just around the frontier, it’s not France and it’s not Spain. There is a Basque movement for their own state. ETA bombings are frequent. Mad shepherds, anarchist and Republican and Loyalist ghosts hover in the passes of the Pyrenees. I imagine their great-coats and blankets in a long line, their dying breath outside a walled city, a medieval fortress. The old stars and the new stars: which are which?
Moving across the map we wander down into a saxophone’s bell, into red roof tiles and steep valleys where the sun is lost, lush river dells and the train station’s clanging bell, pine hills and a sawmill. Mary is on a brief holiday from an insurance firm near Grafton Street. Mary has black running shoes like the Ramones. She has a brother named Feargal.
“Do you have your own place in Dublin?”
“Nah, live with my parents. They’re very strict about me. Curfew at eleven.”
“How did you get away?”
“I fibbed, said I was after going with a choir from Barrytown.” Her trip is an escape; she wants to cram as much in as possible.
Falling south toward Spain, toward Franco’s old address, into frantic romantic languages and slums of fine wine and fat oysters from Arcachon, into a flea market under the triple dizzy skinny spires of a cathedral, buying 1920s hot-jazz postcards. In strange clear light sits an ochre cobble-stoned city looking a little like old Warsaw and unlike Dublin. There’s a wide river but the iron streets and very air are desert-like, even down by the river’s sand-coloured bridges and quais and arches; and in the city’s narrow lanes hangs a Moroccan influence and a grim narcotic 19th century feel.
“I’m lost: Is this the hôtel de ville}”
“I can’t tell.”
I have no guidebook. I’m lost. I should try to find out where my team is. It’s cooler out of the hot square, in shadow, in shaded cafés, trying to ignore the North African beggars and hawkers and the brown heroin. There are too many junkies and sailors.
“Piss off,” Mary says to them, “bunch of bloody culchies.”
I buy fresh fruit to show the Irish woman how sensible I am, how admirable my intentions.
Do you fancy a Big Mac? Mary asks. I’m famished, she says.
I don’t tell her I hate McDonald’s. I prefer Ma and Pa places on principle. She would probably get along better with Neon than me. The town’s tall shutters close to the afternoon heat, streets vacant except for me and mad dogs of empire, of somewhere zealous. The vineyard sun and pale French pilsner wear us down and every hot night falls early on our sleep raving in sweat, our hotel room on the second floor almost floating out the open window and over the green layer of the park’s treetops, the Basques going crazy, my hiking boots and a woman’s shoes airing on the stone sill with the pigeons, goatskin gypsies, junkies, and bums trying to sleep below that layer of green, the level trees defining a layered world of visible classes, and me temporarily above for some reason.
Did Gordie Howe’s luggage ever explode? Did he lose all his favourite shirts? A Basque bomb blows up the bus station and my pack in the locker is destroyed, plaster in my hair but luckily I have a few travellers’ cheques in my pocket. The Irish woman has a sharp tongue in her head.
“Bloody ee-jits!” she says after the explosion. At least she still has her luggage. It’s hot and humid. I need a dozen showers a day to live, to cool off, to still myself.
CHAPTER 46
Lion d’Or
We eat brains of lamb. We hop the electric train to the Bay of Biscay, to the stronger Atlantic tides and the taste of salt in my mouth. In 1941 a number of victorious German soldiers drowned here on leave, tides or waves pounding them under, a small measure of French revenge, so their superiors ordered them from then on to relax at the beach in precise lines: one line of soldiers standing on guard, another line trooping into the surf. Now there is animal electricity, huge brilliant Scandinavian yachts and half-naked south of France women on the beaches; one woman walks up with a little brother and she takes off her top, she calmly strips right beside me. She lies beside me. She is amazingly attractive but I force myself into a seething calm, force myself to not stare. I can’t ask her out. She looks like a nude princess from Monaco with only a piece of white twine around her dark hair. Her serious face, her nude body by my hand. I pretend this is normal for me, that I’m used to nude women, a stranger’s breast in repose alongside my ear. And I’m travelling with an Irish virgin, still wearing her nubbly two-piece suit, still saving herself for some policeman in Galway. Does Mary feel foolish clinging to her top? In Ireland it would be illegal to take off your top, to show your pale breasts. Here it’s illegal to keep your top on.
“Look at that yacht,” she says, “it’s really lovely.” She likes the young tanned deckhands hanging on ratlines in white pants and no shirts. I wonder if Surfer Joe would like it here. The 1941 killer waves now seem wan and milky. Mary jumps and dances in the shallows: Great crack, she says, great fun this is.
It’s hot and humid. Kathy is probably in the cool lake. Her swimmer’s shou
lders. Or working the garden. Feeding her felines in the shade. And I’m going insane, always slumped on a slow train, then falling into a tiny shower stall, water travelling over us, a brief cold respite. Rain rinses the park then it’s instantly hot again.
The Lion d’Or seems a great little hotel, a charming exotic woman named Simone running a bar that also acts as café, depending on the time of day. There is bitter beer made by mad monks, and at dawn men stop their bicycles for a shot of red wine before work. Freighters ride past on the river, holds brimming with Bordeaux wine. Neon is a wine nut: He would love it here just for that. French naval officers in formal white uniforms hang around, close friends of the woman Simone. Breakfast comes with the price of our room so down in the café Mary and I gorge on morning’s bread and croissants and iced butter and thick marmalade, ask the charming Simone for refills: L’eau chaud s.v.p., Simone congratulating me on my awkward grade school French. I try wild pigeon pie in a wine sauce. At first I missed my habitual greasy spoon bacon and eggs but I soon love this foreign time of morning, and the fare—to love the far southwest of France and northern Spain. I forget about hockey, about ever finding my lost team, about the crooked contracts and pending lawsuits. I think about the Intended, what she said while tossing the birth control pills: You shouldn’t even go out with women, she wept. I forget about hockey.
And who is this I travel with? I know nothing about Mary. She is addicted to Big Macs, to junk food. I thought Europeans would be smarter. The older hotel patrons believe us to be lovers, romantic awkward honeymooners, when in truth we irritate each other at times and are travelling together largely to avoid being alone. Men who are dead ringers for Maurice Chevalier and Jean Paul Sartre wink largely as we climb the narrow stairs, send free drinks to our room, wink again when Mary and I sheepishly stumble down, acting the part, blushing, fuming. You can’t just zap it, change channels in mid-country.
Salvage King, Ya! Page 21
