Memory: I don’t know the first name of any of my grandparents, not the ones in Ireland, not the ones in England. This shows you what your life is worth. Less than my long distance bill. No, I take that back. Life is worth more than my long distance bill. It’s the new me. My picture, in a New Jersey uniform, hangs in the unheated community rink and hall, the only local boy to make the NHL. Surely that’s worth something negotiable. Buddy can you spare an RRSP?
The TV announcer warns: When these teams get together, tempers fly!
Tempers fly? The assistant says, You’re costing us a lot of havoc. Can anyone speak English? I am better without the puck, I can take it away from someone easy but then I cannot handle it purely; I check and shadow, a lurking ghost, but no soft hands with a bushel of goals, no ads for soft drinks, no corporate sponsors.
Tickets to the game, you got tickets to the game? Get your red hots!
They threw hats on the ice, lucky octopi, rubber chickens. Dornhoefer was selling life insurance, bugging us. They asked him to leave.
I left instead, went into the sticks and into the welded city. I tried business. I got a job in the city one summer, an apprenticeship, moving uneasily, sideways like a suspicious crab into the bloodless pin-stripes and paisley where the king of beers tastes like piss, with a row of suits behind me, a row of suits before me, and a list of promising phone numbers and delinquent accounts, the same names on both lists. Victims, tire-kickers, primo leads, and the invisible hand our purported friend and master. I missed the directness of cause and effect, the stick to the mouth, getting pushed into the boards headfirst, versus this mannered knifing at the water-cooler, this clichéd water-cooler crap where you’re not sure what the other side is up to. I didn’t like the invisible hand. A Portuguese janitor waxed light into our endless office halls, our Bauhaus sanctums. When newly wiped, the sinks in the highrise washrooms seemed luminous, holy, their Italian tiles enjoying a quasar’s red shift. Are these good people actually concerned that their beer might have an aftertaste?
CHAPTER 49
My Agent: Drive, Lead, Act, Do
I was staying at the hotel right on the ocean. I was younger. He met me in the Bistro Lounge, looking very urban and upscale despite his Western cut suit and brown cowboy boots; a confident man with a low soothing voice and something he wanted to discuss with me. The restaurant manager hovered over him to see how things were, sent us Scotch on the house.
Did we want to eat? Too early to eat, my agent said. Later perhaps some fresh asparagus tips. That will be all.
His wife was a trip: a character out of Sunset Boulevard. Moving into the room very slowly with her head and body erect, looking at no one. She wore a huge black hat, several feet wide, over blonde bangs cut just so. Too much makeup; big earth coloured eyebrows; a black dress suggestive of mourning but bare freckled shoulders. She acted as if her beauty was on display but it was mawkish and scary, a mannequin at our table staring out at the ships in the bay.
“An opportunity,” he said. “You might be interested. Property in the States I bought at 1.7 million. A partner is cashing out. Interesting lawsuit. He had some losses elsewhere; cut down from $7 million value to $2 million. Well that’s his problem.
“My project is now evaluated at over $2 million. I thought you might be interested. You could invest forty or fifty thousand. A short scenario; interested, I’ll package the deal; I’ll talk mortgage terms. I’ve been very busy. Promissory notes into cash, that sort of thing. It’s a good area. By the airport.”
“Airport is good?”
“That’s correct. Absolutely. Twenty acres, 222 units. Floorplans I can show you, all appliances, everything, right down to the handicap rails. Already done down to the last detail. Not high end but QUALITY. NOW, rather than phase it—I want to do it all at once instead. Get it done. Make some money. American dollars.”
“What if I put in 50K and lose it?” I asked.
“It’s secured. Can’t lose it.”
“Who decides what goes in? Say a $500 appliance won’t last as long as a $700 model? Who decides?”
“We do. Me and you. Absolutely. Nobody’s going to bug us. My associates—we speak the same language. That’s correct.”
“Quality?”
“That’s correct. Better than anyone else. New styles.”
“You don’t want to phase it.”
“That’s correct. All at once. The whole nine yards. Here are some computer projections.” His wife handed them to me, looking at me and smiling ever so slightly. I was included now. We kept drinking.
“Take your time. They’re based on rentals. Market drops: we’re still assured revenue. Rent or sell. You cannot lose. You can not lose. Absolutely. It’s slow, sell six, that’s O.K., we rent the others. Can service the debt load. I’ve got eleven projects, I’ve got millions tied up, cash flow is short.”
He moved close. “I’ll be quite honest with you. I thought of you. I asked you here. It’s a window, a unique opportunity. This is like jumping to the bigs. Sometimes you work and work and nothing. Then it all happens. Five years ago: caviar. Last twenty months: hell. Last few weeks: good signs. Absolutely. Talking millions. The scale model is big, cost $42K. Very impressive. Displayed everywhere: City Hall, down by the piers. Very impressive.”
“What if we can’t finish and lose it all? What if they’re empty? Or some delay and I lose everything I have? Cash out my RS PS and I lose the tax break.”
“This is a situation where you’re not going to get hurt. This is a situation where you’re going to make a helluva lot of money.”
Specific storms find our jade fields with loving feelers a thousand miles from the sea. I can’t stop thinking about Neon and my Ex-Wife together, his lean shadow in her farmhouse. I gave her a certain whalebone ring; I saw him wear it like a scalded king. This was the exact weather for the winding down of matrimony, our distillation to less and less and gone. Fireworks spitting when we lived in Chinatown. Romantic picnics at the poplar breaks, bread broken at the river, her Mexican earrings lost while we chased each other in the long grass. Some trees grow best after fire, some don’t. I missed her teeth on me. The guy at the next stool says, “So I gave her a little tap.” A strange feeling to peruse studio and one-bedroom ads while still married. But after a time I could not laugh with her; my Ex-Wife and I lost that ability in separate cities and separate rooms and wordless meals, the two of us splitting like a peanut. Where does that ability go? Can you change it? Recharge? Next time I’ll know what to do, what to say, right?
Choke out, in gear, driverless, my Ex-Wife’s truck putters ahead of me in the flat field, and I follow picking stones, banging rocks onto the tailgate of my mechanical stone boat. Granite, mica, quartz, hornblende, feldspar, veined, heavy, floating up magically from under us. Like us, cattle move on their worn trails. In the heated air insects talk through the nose; I feel vaguely like a nasal insect, peeling some old skin from my life. I’ve seen a shy cougar by that far Cottonwood bluff, wrinkled hunter and hounds trying to track it and never catching up. Though my brain is frying on the hot summer fallow I feel good working. I imagine the stones as teeth off an ancient Chinese mountain way below. At the Pike Street Market I remember the derelict west coast native and the super-rich Tokyo tourist, sharing little else but identical facial features. Uneasy twins. My father was a twin. Faith and doubt are twins. Some are allowed dignity; others scramble. A crapshoot.
How tiny I must appear to that plane. I walk to and fro on the burning ground, like a restless sleeper tossing, tossing rocks into the slow driverless truck. Is that Shirt Is Blue way up there in the air? I found the silver plane inside the lake. The water clear, I was rowing by the sandy point. The outline of the plane was just visible on the quiet furrows of sand. I left a Javex float on a yellow rope anchored with a rock, unable to decide whether to tell anyone of the plane or leave it undisturbed, to rest, to keep it. I’ve become reconciled to having the dead around, what with the vanishing corpses of the swank
y funeral parlour under the condo’s windows, the plane’s passengers swimming with me in the lake mornings, Surfer Joe and my Irish grandfather who drowned the day of Michael Collins’ funeral, the German soldiers on leave in southern France, and also the unburied ghosts of hockey past still swimming in my head.
The phone in the truck rings. I ignore it. It rings again, harder if that is possible. I run up, take the truck out of gear and answer. It’s Kathy and she seems in mid-conversation.
“Three o’clock, three o’clock. I can’t take three o’clock.”
The truck idles beside me, emanating heat in the stoney fold of land.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says. “It gets to a point where you know the person’s not the right person but it goes on.” Does she mean me? “And there’s the whole thing about being alone. I think it goes way back to the way we’re raised. A son is allowed to be left alone once in a while. A daughter is not. That’s the whole reason I got married. You think you shouldn’t be alone.”
“What brought this up?” My Intended? Neon?
“Four walls. Stereo. Sofa,” she says. “And if the marriage made in Heaven doesn’t work I think it’s MY fault. You think if you leave they’ll fall apart.”
Maybe they need to fall apart, I think, smelling a whiff of co-dependence theory. What a handy philosophy that is.
“I think, my private theory, from an early age men learn to lie. Maybe they have to. I don’t know.”
“That’s true,” I say.
But wait, if a male says it’s true, is that a lie? I’m getting confused.
“Cheese is more binding than a wedding ring,” she says.
“True,” I say again.
“After about three months it got O.K. I had several big hunting dogs, ice cream, half-hour talks with my dad. Just don’t do it alone. That’s my advice.”
“O.K.,” I say. “Sure,” I say.
“You know I used to sneak cigars from my dad; he had a little pile; sneak ’em. Wellsir, I’ve got work in the garden that’s not going to do itself,” and she hangs up as if I called her. I look around, trying to take in some simple lesson: in early August the bears prowl the pale coulees and verdant valleys, stuffing themselves on buffalo berries and ground squirrels. I saw a grizzly sow and cubs west of here and a neighbour shot a black bear in a dispute over a beehive. Some days you eat the bear—some days it eats you. I saw another turkey vulture; they’re tough but they are not common. You rarely see them in bookstores getting self-help books.
I call Neon and get his machine: “I can’t come to the phone right now, I’m at the mirror having a hair loss crisis.” Join the club.
I call Shirt Is Blue: no answer. No advice.
I call my Intended; she says she’s going to bring me some lunch to the field. She jokes she’ll wear a waitress outfit, “just like you’ve always wanted.” How much does she actually know and how much is just chance? My secrets eat at me. I love them but they eat at me.
I decide to risk calling the Waitress long distance. I don’t need to look up the number. A man answers: Hello? Hello? Words float several thousand miles of wire and bureaucrats and static exhalations, the two of us, a country apart, wondering: who is this on the other end of the line? Sometimes I feel like the blind man I saw dancing in a tourist desert. I decide one thing: I decide serious farmers are either stoics or control freaks. I decide nothing can be satisfactorily explained. Two things.
I’m boiling and filthy from moving my boots and brain through the field, the summer fallow, so I wade in the gilded water, I circle atop an air mattress fountaining lake water from my mouth. Sound carries, amplifies on summer waters. I’m so sick of men, says a young woman onshore; what goes through your little pea-brains?
Geez, I dunno, says a young man squinting; don’t you have any beer around here? Like Shirt is Blue, he is fully dressed and smoking at the Public Beach. I believe certain types sleep fully dressed and smoking. I realize I haven’t seen Shirt Is Blue lately.
You see? the woman on the beach says, we might as well speak different languages. Are you listening? she says.
To lie on a dark blue air mattress. A Devonian rockface revolving, our sun looping in tight circles, our sandy earth a wheel and our lake a wheel, spinning. Brass light plays on the banks of the burnished shallows where dories and speedboats, restrained by painters, rock like barges in the swell. Where is Shirt Is Blue and his pirate laugh? Arr Matey.
Are you listening to me? asks the woman on the shore.
Our pier has no paint. In a sunlit cove young Cleopatras bathe, splashing each other carefully, as if obeying an unseen choreographer. Can one go upon coals, and his feet not be burned? Their faces are brown but the sides of their breasts are pale. They didn’t have to wear a top in Greece, they’re not going to wear one here. Around the lake several older doctors adjust their German binoculars or swing the child’s telescope on its tripod, zero in on the half-naked young women, updating Susannah and the Elders. The tamed wilderness behind them is a sultry tapestry: tidy deer trails, crippled green aspen, snowberries, lilies like lanterns, like eyes in a peacock’s tail. Thé Cleopatras shampoo in the glint, brown naked shoulders forward, arms tense at their side, aware of eyes, aware of being watched, being searched. Waters rove mutely against their hips, between thighs. I would like to fall from my blue air-mattress and come up like a seal amongst them, sharing a plain familiar dialect, but I understand I would be unwelcome, some older jerk with battle-scars, some perv. I leave them alone. I can’t blame them. Maybe they’re right, cradling some naïve truth next to their young skin: Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.
Are you listening to me? the woman on the shore asks in vain.
I drift along the pretty lake, drift off to sleep in the sun, and my glittering little pea-brain has a dream the season started and I’m not ready, I don’t have a uniform, I’m late for the first game, I can’t find the Moscow-style arena and I can’t understand anyone’s mother tongue. The coach, whoever it is, is going to murder me. Then in the dream we are beaten badly by some girls’ Pee Wee team. The frozen puck keeps going in no matter what I do. Above the lake hang sandy cliffs and green cow hills and distant diesels gnashing, truck voices emoting, their gears changing languages as they are forced to climb, to push further west listening to the low gods of Nashville music. A voice seems to say aloud, “O sluggard. When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?” I wake feeling terrible, dazed, my back and retina burning, the lake and sun one big white room vibrating like a choking motor. Where has everyone gone? The lake is empty, without borders.
I float alone on a rectangle of reptilian rubber; the Cleopatras, finished bathing each other, have retreated to their big white towels, their knotty pine preserves and Bateman prints. The mattress moves whether we care or not for it, a jay screeches, imitating a tire hitting tarmac, and a telephone is ringing changes across the water, the device unable to hint whether loathing or devotion holds court at the other end of the line; they make you wait and learn the lexicon, jump through the wondrous hoops. You fly on instruments and the sky is all gelato and bone and bird. I’m another blind pilot stepping through clouds into an altered secret world.
CHAPTER 50
No One Has a Memory
At night the Intended and I share her kitchen table, attempting to straighten out taxes, receipts, cheque books, etc., while listening to Janis Joplin’s last album. Killing an irksome minor dragon. Finance is not exactly romance but may actually be a serious cousin. It’s as intimate, as intricate; months and days are laid out. There is a candle. That helps the mood.
“I’ll call out the numbers; you do the calculator stuff.”
“You can do the calculator,” she says.
“No, no I can’t. It’s like with horses, they can tell I’m no good at it.” She understands what I mean. When we move she puts the stereo jacks back together. If we rent a VCR she’s the one who knows how to cajole the bare wires and convinc
e the buttons. She knows computers inside out and I don’t have a clue how to turn one on.
“Thanks for unpacking the toilet paper,” she says. “You’re welcome,” I say. She buys toilet paper sixty-four rolls at a time, afraid of running out.
I’m tidying up. I wash the dishes and I put all the magazines in the rack. “Hey, leave the TV Guide out.”
Yes, I know: the most important document in the abode. My Intended’s family never ate meals together. Each child ate alone, a separate TV narrating each bedroom’s story.
Waitress X doesn’t own a TV whereas my Intended sometimes craves the cathode ray, becomes a serious student of the unwavering blue eye. I go either way. By now Waitress X is living in Toronto studying journalism. Is she living alone? Am I? Someday Waitress X will cover my non-story, my nonexistent son making or not making the NHL, or my bust at the border, or perhaps my murder in Mexico: a funeral on the bald prairie, one golden eagle studying us from the telephone pole. Her every feature is wrong but together they are strangely stunning, naturally sexy on the small screen, warm. On my story she will sign off stoically, but with a private catch in her husky voice. I will rise from the economy coffin a bellyaching zombie: “She said she’d write every week! But did she? Did she? No!” Knowing already that she’ll explain it all and it will make perfect sense and then maybe I will find my final peace. Note the pun resisted. Waitress X has a tattoo on her ankle. My Ex-Wife has no tattoos. My Intended has no tattoos.
There once was a sawmill where my junkyard is. The sawmill’s long gone but chainsaws still rev in the woods, different pitches and volumes sent out like voices calling and answering. One chainsaw revs high, then falls off, another rises noisily in its place. One chainsaw frantic, unceasing; another slow, jerky. There is less light in the trees, shorter days. By late August some leaves are yellow already, which depresses me. Night rain strips the leaves, hauling the worms up to breathe. Worms can change sex freely, perform either role. This could save some grief, counselling, surgery.
Salvage King, Ya! Page 23
