Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

I remember once in the spring Waitress X came up the walk in a sundress only, nothing beneath and buttons undone on her bare back, telling me she stopped first for champagne and cranberry juice and she wonders why they stared at her in the store. Is she serious? The Stanley Cup was on TV early and we sat inside on a nice day. I hadn’t known her long. A few guys seem obsessed with her, she allowed coyly, the Newfoundland man offers money, gifts, a free apartment, lends her a Mustang. One lovelorn boy, travelling what she calls the South Seas, writes futile bad poetry to her by airmail. I resolved grumpily not to be like them, to be cool. That’s not the answer.

  Why was she telling me all this, after all? To make me jealous? To show her worth? To change me? To warn me? I have no idea. I didn’t dwell on it. Things were too hectic. She had such a long reach; it had certain advantages. Her hands could be in several palaces at once, her hands could wander all around the world, the south seas, the north seas, the Sargasso Sea, the lunar seas.

  We slouched on a foothills balcony at dusk and three school girls skipped past singing sweetly “Every Sperm Is Sacred.” I wondered if I was hearing right. I found later this song is culled from a Monty Python movie but at the time I took it for a hallucinatory rejoinder from my Catholic altar boy past.

  We sipped our skinny champagne while my landlady in California endured her chemo, ten days on and ten days off. Actually the prognosis is good. Waitress X later told me, “I called the Newfoundland man and he was very cold to me.” ? haven’t thought that much about you,’ is what he told her on the phone, ? haven’t thought that much about you.’ This smacks to me of measured revenge for something. “Smacks to me,” says Waitress X, “sounds kinky.” Please. First the bubbly, later the chemo. Then maybe the bubbly again, our cells in a sailor’s knot.

  CHAPTER 54

  What I Know About Art

  When I lay stunned and stunted in her old-fashioned bed, the fingers of my hand unwrapping from the iron rail (the pale ceilings of post-sex, and her art, terrifying Inuit prints on her walls), when I saw manic Waitress X placing a long slip or soft bra on her cinnamon skin, when I saw her distracted at her dresser, readying her public self for the late afternoon tables of businessmen, for the glum screaming oilmen seeking attitude adjustment, well I confess I desired things to stop at that stage—not nude and not dressed, on the cusp, the edge, the two of us with tons of time and no particular place to go.

  But we never had vague time, we never had lingering infinite possibilities. We’re so modern, running way past modern. Sorry, I really have to run. We’ll get old not knowing, running. I lost her to her public clothes, her sliding walk and the city’s pitiful trees bending like waitresses over 4th Street.

  One morning without calling I ran in and rapped smartly on her apartment door. No answer. I didn’t linger. I snuck away quickly. I had important errands; I had to run.

  Waitress X was unclothed; she threw on a blouse, shorts, sans underwear, and then ran to answer her door.

  Who’s there? No one there.

  But her boyfriend showed up immediately after. If she had been faster to answer my knock I would have been trapped inside with her in the iron bed, taking off her lack of underwear, in the pink, in the middle kingdom without a paddle. Baseball bats to the head, perhaps a skull smashed while lingering near her hips. We might have rated media interest, certainly the local papers.

  Waitress X told me she once scissored and saved a newspaper picture of me. I’m a packrat but I can’t keep a photo of her. I could not explain a picture of a woman if my Intended found it in a drawer. Drunk I pull out the birthday card she gave me. “Love Always,” it’s signed. She didn’t mean it. I throw it in the trash, fish it out, put it back in, fish it out, put it back in . . . Jesus H Christ, make up your mind before she does.

  My Intended rents a video that seems to echo my past affairs, my specialized stumblings. It’s an amazing nagging, low budget movie of the moment. I haven’t seen it and I have seen it.

  “Have you had an affair?” My Intended turns and asks me on the bed as the final credits roll. She wants two answers, two mints in one.

  “No.”

  But I envision a different gone face hovering in grave sweat above me, a rehearsed cinema image. They film at 6:00 A.M. for the special light and no one’s really even awake but still it’s effective, fairly Italian.

  “If you have,” she says calmly, “someday I’m going to feel pretty stupid. Why do I trust you?” she asks. “Why?”

  I will try, I think, to deserve it. I will give my reply in the form of a question.

  In sleep with my Intended I still curl back into the old game, bent in the faceoff circle, winning the draw: pull back and shoot, a sniper, my mind click-click. The puck rings off metal, into the net and out again, but never the red light. The senile old men with hands quivering over the button: are they blind!?

  I stomp to the referees. It was in for Christ’s sake! stomping around bedrooms and hoarse hotels later with the same pointless words (They robbed me!), re-skating the dreamless game, peopled by statues now, they can’t hold a candle to me; I see it all, I fly the white-blue ice, there are no marks on the ice, no marks on my face, I am barefoot like Bobby Orr, the pass is perfect and I split the defence, the goalie waits, waits, then commits himself and I find my opening, the Fuhr hole, the white silent netting. But never the red light. I wake in the minors to wreck the room, to begin again. And for some reason my Intended is there waiting.

  My Intended and I sit all afternoon on the rebuilt pier, the pier my father and I hammered together from several older piers. My Intended and I sit happily splashing our feet in the glacial lake, cracking a $5 grocery bag of strawberries and pistachios, sipping from a litre of Shirt Is Blue’s homemade wheat beer and dreaming up names for a kid.

  “Maria? Evelyn? Dymphny? Twila?”

  “What about boy names? We need some boy names.”

  “Levi? Craig? Leighton?”

  We walk along the sunny shore until she is freckled as a turkey egg. That admirable cliché: to feel alive. Freighters of regret seem to pull out, leaving me. It’s a holiday of sorts, a break. The lake is much higher from the storms, bright stones beneath slowly going green with algae, the lake slowly dying from too many cottages, from septic fields and fertilizer and loss of brush and trees. Cattle contentedly munch larkspur.

  West of the cabin we discover Shirt Is Blue’s lapstrake rowboat; it broke free in the storm, its clinker-built hull jammed in green reeds and lily pads under the plateau. We find two branches and my Intended and I row home with gusto, surprising mallards and muskrats. A dead piglet floats past, presumably from Kathy’s farm, but this doesn’t matter. This is not an omen, though I first took it for a baby. I fish the piglet out with my father’s rake.

  A bird crashes and the skin of the lake yields a fine fish. You just have to be as accurate as possible. Imagine you’re that fish, yanked by talon or hook through the ceiling of your home, wondering what one-eyed gods are above.

  Imagine if every time we hit a restaurant or buffet there was a chance we’d be hauled into the sky on an invisible wire. Gone. Where? Where the hell did they go? No one knows. Actually, when I think on it, that is exactly how it is. I lose some sympathy for the stolen fish.

  “What kind of bird is that?” she asks, shading her eyes.

  “What kind of bird? I know. Oh hell I can’t think of the name. I’m losing my mind, I swear. Osprey? Falcon? Marsh-hawk? Goshawk?”

  A brainy raptor plugs into a thermal, corkscrews into faint mare’s tail clouds embrued with lipstick lines of light. The faintest mare’s tail clouds, so close to nothing.

  “Look.” My fingers are red with strawberry. Her eyes are blue. They’re the gin in the cocktail of light. We taste of fruit, of warm sunshine. We’re necking and I have to admit to myself, maybe I have already admitted to myself, that the Intended is the one for me, as close to a Shelter Corporation as I’m ever going to get in this crash and trash technicolour world. There’s alwa
ys doubt but she stays near me for reasons not found in the prime directive. We’re relaxed with each other and maybe that’s enough. In a crisis she’s solid. Why do I demand more by way of evidence}

  We finish the roasted pistachios, the strawberries, licking juice, salt and sun from our fingers, kicking our feet like children in the cold lake.

  Eyes closed, my Intended tilts her face to the sun. Years ago my sister used to hold tinfoil around her face to catch more sun. In this spot.

  “Tell me if I’m getting red.”

  “Okey dokey. I will.”

  I dip my fingertips in strawberry juice and daub her cheekbones red, inking her skin red, long scarlet stripes down her throat and into her shirt. Crazed makeup; my Intended is suddenly altered by art. In a blood mask.

  “What are you doing?” She keeps her eyes closed to the glare mirroring off the lake.

  “You’re getting red.”

  “Fuck off,” she whispers without malice.

  “You asked me to tell you.”

  I open her shirt (actually one of my father’s shirts from the cabin) and slowly fingerpaint a circle on one breast, my red fingers lingering over her private heart. I smear strawberry juice over both of her breasts in slow circles; I leave primitive arrows from her pink soft nipples to her ribs, long jagged stripes to her startling white hip bones.

  “Art,” I say, “modern art. I’m making a statement.”

  She inhales, says, Mmmm. She exhales. She keeps her eyes closed. I do a large X over her belly. X. I put my face on her warm round belly and can smell the red juice mixing with the scent of her freckled skin. X. My face.

  I associate her with the taste of pistachios she brought me when I was laid up in the Catholic hospital after my motorcycle accident, after I hit John Ghostkeeper’s moonblind horse.

  I slid the motorcycle right off the All Weather Road and I met my neighbour’s barbed wire. My tongue lay back in my throat instead of down someone else’s. It was my blue period. I turned blue until they pulled my tongue free. In the next hospital bed the boy with the halo and silver bolts stayed very still. He had smashed his father’s Oldsmobile; we have all smashed our fathers’ Oldsmobiles.

  I ate the pistachios, my Intended’s small gift, when I could not sleep and I thought of my Intended and not someone else. Not X.

  I was in an iron bed again, a mechanical hospital bed, party to everyone’s nocturnal noises. I could hear old men’s eyelashes down waxed halls and hear smokestack lightning playing above the hospital roof.

  The oil boom was kaput (attitude adjustment), the reduced city humming around me in cobalt highrises and elevator octaves. John Ghostkeeper’s moon-blind horse: bits of me had been left there on the wire. I changed on the wire, turned blue; my inarticulate tongue would not let me breathe, I was choking on my tongue. I had been in trouble, caught, and thought of her alone. I lay in a Catholic hospital. Some nights we float wards of dream-song machines, our hearts clicking like turnstiles and no one else on the planet.

  CHAPTER 55

  The Green Lake Blinks

  These trigger-happy decades jostle each other in an odour of kindling and fresh-cut geraniums blazing in sunshine; these golden years jump around, thrash like a misguided compass. There is no true north. Despite this confusion I attempt to draw a line right now and say, THAT was my old life. Waitress X belongs to the penny ante past, and is therefore not real. I’m no longer hockey’s iron man. That’s done.

  I have my few acres of snow and I salvage what I can from the auto parts I have. How many engine jobs later, the body persists. I take things apart and I try my best to put them together. Every year water moves, locks and I can skate on it, the lake closes and opens like an eye. No more abortions in Memphis. I’m at the end of something, like the papier maché dinosaur disintegrating in weather, in my gravel driveway. Like the late season bones of a braided river. My Intended takes her temperature; I am a father. She laughs at me. I have an heir, another little Salvage King. I wonder what trouble he’ll get into (I’m sure it’s a he). You didn’t pick that up off the ground, my uncle in Philly always said.

  My Intended and I started in a car and the beach went to mush. And now somewhere on a riverine beach in California a sparkling BMW resurrects itself, rising at dawn from the sand, rinsed, cleansed, runnels of clear water streaming from the chrome gunwales. Light goes back to the sun. Black cliffs stand patiently in reverse breakers as the perpetually angry boyfriend’s fleet fist withdraws from my face. In my cartilage the appropriate atoms alter, my nose heals itself, a nation heals itself, another Pleasant Valley Sunday: My, smell that refreshing breeze. The surf wrenches itself backward and Surfer Joe springs back up from his mousetrap, alive and in love. His girlfriend on the beach smiles. Tail first, the floatplane lifts itself from the lake, the passengers finding their dry seats, the windshield piecing itself back into one clean curve. Ed McMahon writes me from his lucky niche in that Lolita republic, says, You May Already Be A Winner. But you must act now. And he’s right: I must act.

  CHAPTER 56

  Cleopatra X

  It is a given that Surfer Joe is still out there somewhere making meaty smashes, ripping chest-high junk, looking for hooks under the lip on an 8’6” nose-rider; he smashes the lip heading for the shore break and speeds up for an elevator re-entry as I walk to the post office and spot Waitress X on the Mongolian restaurant’s tiny patio. I have to stroll right by her, my heart going nuts. Is that her old boyfriend? Does he still shove her around? Did they patch it up or is this new talent? I can’t see. What will the two of us say if she sees me? Her hair looks straighter now, darker, no more gel but more eye makeup, hence a look a little like Cleopatra. She wears it well. There is a pattern of small rain in the sunlight and they stand to go. She is not looking at me and her long body twists to leave the awkward tiny tables, her back slightly arched. I hear her voice breathe Bye to the waiter, smiling. I’m just below on the sidewalk. Now we’re ghosts to each other. That beautifully hoarse voice, her bare arms; I’d actually forgotten the way she looks, her waist and legs, her perfumed neck, those huge eyes that seem so focussed, dark and light, staring only at YOU, the mandatory gaps in her dress, olive green, tight, my heart, all working together and there is no dimestore hurt, but instead a strange exhilaration that she is back in town, a half block from where I’m staying, and I knew her, I necked with her, joked with her, me! My vocabulary cannot keep up with what I’m sensing. I start laughing on the glittering sidewalk, I feel fine. What a riot. I too ate and gabbed with her, I too took that trendy dress off, gazed on her pretty brown nipples, her shining space-age top loosened in the sun on the porch while she talked breezily and failed to bore me and I worried and fretted for nothing.

  I turn. I keep walking to the post office, not waiting for her to move out the restaurant door. I don’t understand it but I don’t need to. I don’t need to see her and I don’t need to understand.

  CHAPTER 57

  Cheekbones

  Neon mails me an unhappy rambling postcard from Australia, from an attic room under the roof of a beach hotel. “My friends turned on me. Queen St. turned on me,” he writes with some hyperbole, “Toronto turned on me, all of Canada turned on me. I failed as a human bean. Needed fresh pastures.”

  Neon’s drumming in a thrash band nights in Sydney and working a needle exchange; he’s been moving around, thumbing up the coast. He has taken up surfing at Bondi Beach or Fingal Heads, taken up where Surfer Joe left off. Like California, the surfers in Oz have an attitude, believe the light shines out of their behind.

  “I love Australia,” Neon writes from his exile.

  I think of him way down there on the underside of the curving blue globe. In effect Neon is surfing upside-down, hung upside down, watching for sharks and stinging jellyfish. Gravity glues Neon to his upside-down wave.

  Kathy drops by for a swim. On my deck she drops her white shorts, leaves her panties on. Kathy unbuttons her plaid shirt. Sometimes with her cheekbones it�
�s like you can see her skull. Barefoot, Kathy tiptoes the steep path to the water, holding herself as she gingerly walks downhill. The submerged plane still moves in the lake, our gyroscope, sensing her. They’re waiting for a barge from somewhere up north so they can salvage the plane. Kathy breast-strokes to the raft, alone: I’m not home. The ravens are still there. My raft is still webbed by the same bearded spiders that have been there since we were children and she moves 20 yards from shore, taking a deep breath before putting her head under.

  Neon’s head snaps up, a ferocious corona of water travelling from his spiky head. The Australian hostel supplies free surfboards. When he falls into the ocean he falls toward Canada, toward his lost home, toward Kathy, both in the water. Then he has to climb away from us to breathe.

  My Ex-Wife stays under the murky green lake; she rises, her billowing white hair becoming a sleek cap pressing her lovely skull. Kathy can stay under much longer than I can and she can stay in cold water much longer than I can. My Ex will take care of herself.

  In Australia Neon walks through tropical woods flecked with parrots and geckos, divine-coloured butterflies and coconut trees, Neon seeing to the clear ocean and the razor-sharp coral beneath. Neon will fall again from his slippery board, fall into burnt out surf and his history of ancient hard habits. But Kathy is adept and sly with her feet in a fertile garden of earth, her sad eye shadow and Arabians and pure theorems of resentment. We will be in touch, she’s just up the road, she’s so close.

  Waitress X is a future I know I will never see again, though I would like to; the east swallows the west, tail in the snake’s mouth. I heard later that she drove east alone, two days, nonstop: her companion blew all his money on cocaine and could not make the trip. I was jealous for nothing, I was jealous of no one, an empty seat. Waitress X’s kitten nearly blew away from her; the passenger window was open a tiny bit and her kitten squeezed almost all the way out. With the kitten flapping in the breeze, Waitress X held onto one of its hind legs and tried to steer, swerving full speed down the narrow Trans-Canada. Her long reach. She dragged the kitten back in and did not crash her car. Happily ever after.