Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  I’m getting to the walk-in clinic (right by the dog vet) as my thigh is starting to hurt more, bleed more. Had to lose the dusty car. Charming doctor. “Hallo,” he says blinking, sounding English and thrilled by my fresh scarlet wound, “what have we here?”

  What we have here: Small parts flung from me, bone spurs in my heel, a bum knee, anterior cruciate ligament, pinwheels and armoured sputniks and ghosts of iron gas dust, no problem, I’m taking care of it, all right?

  The doctor makes tsk-tsk sounds, cleans me up.

  What we have here: is the dirge of traffic, a frame-bent Chrysler, a chamber driving west; is 30 games, 3 goals and 3 assists, a team strapped in, NO SMOKING lit up, turbulence Utah to Nashville, way down south in the hookworm league, bleached stewardesses limping up and down the aisles like manic brides; is my heart bleeds.

  On the plane a couple of stupid drunken players ripped open one buxom stewardess’ blouse. She was upset. Later one of the stewardesses took a razor and quietly slashed our suitjackets where they hung by the stew’s galley. I did nothing and now my dad’s old tweed coat’s cut up. I tried subtlety; what is basic survives.

  I wasn’t on for a single goal against, yet we lose 7-4. Players’ Agent Denies Swindle—See Sports, Page B2. Yes, that used to be my agent.

  I wonder, are the doctors’ tsk-tsk sounds part of their med-school training? I’ve been playing too long.

  Dobozy the redhead goalie says, “That asshole is like a broken record. Down the wing and a slap shot. Down the wing and a slap shot. Never pass. I count on it, you count on it.” And it’s true; I never play the pass with this winger. He thinks he’s too hot a player to give it to anyone else. That becomes his name: Never Pass.

  On the boards I take the puck away and skate up ice. Never Pass hooks me in the stomach but I move the puck over the blue line where he hooks me again. I shove him quickly and keep going and he hits me on the back of the head as I’m leaving, says to me, Fuck off old man. The ref steps in and we get offsetting penalties; this means I get the exact same as him. He hooks me twice and hits my head and insults me on top of it and we both get two minutes for looking so good. Now is that fair? Is there a God? If I’d known, I’d have hit him harder, I’d have really decked him, got my money’s worth.

  Our best player has mono. We lose by about twenty goals and Dobozy the goalie calls from the showers: “Hey I know why we lost—we didn’t get our lucky dressing room.”

  We all laugh. After time there is a kind of gallows humour to losing; we joke about how bad we are, just wanting to keep the score respectable. No double digits.

  “Fuck, these showers are strong,” yells Dobozy, “You could have a carwash in here.”

  Already down to five defencemen, two of whom are tits on a bull. For a while they need me: how happy this makes me; to be wanted again, in demand temporarily.

  How many miles have I skated, how many hours inside this sweaty helmet, how many teeth rattled at the blue line? For what? And exactly how much has my ex-agent absconded with? See Page B2 (Players’ Agent Denies Swindle).

  CHAPTER 7

  Are You the Jealous Type? (Yes.)

  Is this Hutterite chicken? demands Shirt Is Blue, stuffing fresh squash in his face. Arr-Matey, I’m not eating any damn Hutterite chicken.

  “Eat it and be quiet,” warns Kathy.

  Shirt Is Blue laughs and starts coughing up a half century of Marlboros.

  “Still smoking those cowboy killers?”

  “Oh yeah, whatever eh. Keep ‘em coming bud, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Damn stockyard says I’m one steer short. I’m sure they lost it or sold it with someone else’s.”

  “Wouldn’t they see your brand?”

  “Who knows. Lost money on that whole deal, bought them too late, five broken fences. They went wild on me. Couldn’t find them all. My barn burnt up. Prices fell. Now they lose another. Oh my, oh my. And I’m still smoking and drinking and cussing. That’s nothing, that won’t hurt me. I know things worse than that, know a lot of good old boys way worse than me.”

  The crows of November hunker on the lake, red thunder slashing noon. Shirt Is Blue lights up. Summer moves somewhere below us, down south. Key West, New Orleans, the Baja and Sea of Cortez. I paid my respects at Hank Williams’ tombstone in Montgomery, Alabama.

  I played with the Birmingham Bulls, Salt Lake City, K.C., Nebraska, upstate N.Y., both coasts, Billington, Billings, in Saskatchewan for $100 a game, under the table—no tax. I circle and I circle but at least I’m not a gofer, not a messenger wheedling in monoxide. I move and I hit and cause havoc. Swedes stay out of my way. I have garbage goals and chronic shoulder ailments, floating debris, but I’m no flunky on a bus strap or sweating into a hot dog grill. And most of all, and I can be reduced to my wonky knees in wonder thanking Whoever over this, I do not toil for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

  From the blonde planks of my cabin’s unfinished sundeck I see a silver plane smack my lake and go under, long wings leaving a small seam that heals itself with a sharp hiss. It’s not stormy; it’s a nice day. Was the angle wrong? Maybe the small plane stalled in the final approach and they were too low to recover, to pull out. One wing dipping, hitting water first and pulling all of the plane down, a fast cartwheel, mallards leaping up from the lake at the same time.

  There is little resistance, no debris and a silver plane still banks down there somewhere in my lake, one wing lifting up, then dipping that wing down, shedding bubbles while descending; some myopic avenue where dead mingle with living. The floatplane is lost. Humans inside it scrambling to get out as I watch the water where I think they went under. I’m alone. My Intended is working in the city. I call the RCMP on the party-line and feel they don’t quite believe me.

  Bounding down the muddy slope to the lake, my feet bang the wooden steps I cut into the hillside, and eight ducklings flee from under my pier, frightened at my commotion. The mother duck comes to live under my pier every year. A regular. Her head is like brown suede, an eye placed in each side like beautiful gold buttons. She leads her children from shore, assuming the worst.

  I haul out the wooden rowboat. It leaks. It floats. The plane did not.

  You’re funny, the waitress said. Why do hockey players all drive these pimp cars? the waitress said. It felt like a heart when she held it lightly, a purple streamlined heart beating; she took this streamlined heart with her teeth, lifted it on her tongue like a question. I am her regular.

  The day is warm and I row hard. Water-lilies on the lake have opened like popcorn, like eyes.

  I had one body from the plane in my hand, couldn’t hold on. It was heavy and just sank. My wet arm over the gunwale, straining into my lake. Then I went onto the body, tipped headfirst. I love the waitress. I can’t let on. It’s too soon. Or maybe it’s too late. Either way the timing sucks.

  My Intended, an educated, rational, albeit temperamental 20th Century woman, marks the full moons on the calendar, and when a full moon falls, she sleeps with a wallet full of cash under her pillow, in the firm belief that her wallet will then never be empty.

  After the death of her husband the climber, my former wife Kathy told me over tea and chocolate Digestives, “I don’t think that God called him away, or that it was his ‘time’ or anything mystic, I just think he fell off a stupid mountain.”

  Toes frozen, skin gone weird, fingers dead, climbing frozen vertical rivers for fun. Rock or ice falls from climbers above and he’s gone. I imagine a rag of red slipping down a huge stone wall, highway smoking far below the climbers, road following the river, bottoms of the clouds spilling something, and the news of the fall traveling to town.

  Kathy sees no afterlife where one can climb mountains anew or look up Jimi Hendrix. My former wife lent me the dead man’s tire chains for drives over the icy pass.

  The chains make my Intended nervous, she thinks they might be bad luck, bad Juju, as if it’s catching. It’s true—my Ex-wife has had bad luck, the snakebit roll of the dice
. It’s not my fault though, is it? Maybe the wallet under the pillow trick will work for her (put money in thy purse).

  Shirt Is Blue asks Kathy, Which way do you want it? When you go. Burned or wormed?

  I don’t like being buried in a hole, says Kathy.

  Whoosh, a fiery end then, nuking you down to a few key chips and ashes.

  I won’t be here, she says. Do whatever you want.

  Oh no, I won’t be here, says Shirt Is Blue. I’ll be long gone.

  You? Don’t be so bloody maudlin. We’ll have to take you out and shoot you like an old horse.

  I have a nice little burial plot that could be yours for the right price.

  No, she says.

  A view of the lake, he says happily. You’ll thank me.

  After I’m dead I’ll thank you?

  Your mouth says yes but your eyes say no. Or is it viceversa?

  Kathy is in a voluminous grey sweater and longjohns: her long-haired treeplanter look.

  Shirt Is Blue is wearing all denim as if an obsession: jeans, jean shirt, and jean jacket. Maybe denim socks and underwear; who knows? Inside his half-finished fieldstone and barnwood mansion his chairs and sofas are upholstered in denim. A denim universe.

  “What, you get a discount on this stuff?” Kathy asks. She picks up his Spanish gut-string guitar and tries out Stardust quietly. I watch her. My Intended is working in the city. I’m lazing around, looking out Shirt Is Blue’s huge picture windows.

  “The neck is warped,” she tells me, pushing back her long hair. “Warped just a little.”

  “Roof’s leaking somewhere and I can’t find it. Liable to break my damn neck if I get up there when it’s wet and it’s as good a roof as any man’s when it’s dry.”

  Neon has a shotglass and a tiny mandolin. Puts his feet up on the kitchen table and plays along with Kathy’s guitar. They smile at each other. No singing.

  Shirt Is Blue’s new house is sited on a hogback ridge with a view of the mountains and views up two different shallow valleys. A neat silver lake quiet at our feet, a plane in it hiding from us this moment. Jackfish and sunfish jumping or just touching the surface with a mouth.

  “Where’d you get this weird table?” Neon asks.

  “That time in Mexico. They told me Trotsky ate at that table before they got him with the icepick. Probably Frida Kahlo too. Those two, they had an affair, eh. Got it for a song really.” Which may mean it cost a fortune.

  The house’s basement level is cut into the ridge and has a cold stone floor and Shirt Is Blue’s childhood bunkbeds. Upstairs Shirt Is Blue put in pine floorboards; did the floors himself. There is rough green pottery, old family quilts, and an ancient pinball machine, a Williams FunFest with dual slingshots. The FunFest works pretty well. Do Not Tilt, it says. When I’ve been gone a while it seems I don’t always know what to say to my old friends. Decompression, I feel tilted.

  “Fishsticks,” Shirt Is Blue shouts at me, his open freezer compartment roaring. “Arr-matey, who wants fishsticks and hot sauce?”

  “I will,” says Neon, “I’m starving. I’m a starving artist. What kind of hot sauce you got? Scorching hot?” Shirt Is Blue also has sixty butchered chickens in the deep freeze. Bread, vegetables, pheasant, pickles, dumplings, and severed pigs. Shelves of preserves. He’s almost self-sufficient. Lots of real food. But I guess fishsticks are a little easier for company. I grew up with too many fishsticks. Can’t think of anything for supper? My mother would thaw fishsticks. I grew up thinking fish were rectangular.

  “You think there’s any real fish in these?” asks Kathy. “What is the ratio of fish to, say, sawdust, that we are prepared to live with?”

  “Skip that whole reasoning thing,” advises Shirt Is Blue. He burps and whispers excuse me. “Well, what are you staring at?!”

  We’re staring in the trees just north of the lake, just north of my junkyard; we’re staring at three mutilated cattle by a slough.

  My Intended has her videocam to document the mutilations, add to her collection of weird scenes from the goldmine. She’s good with cameras and video, drove out with some of her gear from the city. She’s wearing a black jacket that says SECURITY in yellow letters on the back. A bisexual L.A. musician gave it to her during an interview or some kind of shoot. I’m jealous. The cattle are Shirt Is Blue’s stock, Red Angus. Less pinkeye with Red Angus. Not that it matters when they’re found dead on the gumbo.

  “What is cutting up the animals like this?” asks my Intended, panning, freezing, zooming in. “It looks like a scalpel did it,” she says. “Satanic stuff? Ritual stuff? Weird incisions, really clean.”

  “UFOs,” I say, chiming in with my two bits’ worth.

  “UFOs full of surgeons?” asks my Intended.

  “Assholes from the city,” says Shirt Is Blue, kicking dirt with his cowboy boots. “That’s my theory.”

  “Could be wolves,” I counter. “I saw a few wolves last year strung out across the ice on the lake. Could hear them calling to each other at night.”

  “Wolves?” says Shirt Is Blue skeptically. “You saw wolves? Not coyotes?”

  “They looked too big and ragged. But maybe,” I say, starting to wonder.

  “Enough light for the camera, Miss Thing?”

  “Hey tons of light. Got a world of light here. Miss Thing??!”

  “Maybe Ringo Starr did it. Thomas the Tank Engine told him to do it; he was tired of being a really useful engine.”

  Shirt Is Blue points up. “Look, guys,” he says. “Mr. Nature time. If the clouds cast a shadow it’s going to rain. If they open and close it will rain.” He says, “Cattle under a tree means rain. But bats late in the evening: clear. Full moon rising, like that CCR song: clear.”

  “I think it’s Bad Moon Rising,” says my Intended.

  “There you go, there you go.”

  This reminds me of the time four of us were driving in Kathy’s Chevy, smashing through snowdrifts and trying vaguely to stay between the ditches.

  “I like that Bob Marley one,” volunteered Shirt Is Blue squished in beside me, heat blasting and our big winter jackets on. “What’s it called? Retention Songs? I like that one.”

  At Halloween Shirt Is Blue brews his Great Pumpkin Rum (he liked Linus as a young teen).

  “Watch,” he says, gouging out a giant pumpkin. “Take out all the seeds, add sugar, put the lid back on like so, wait until Christmas, and it’s done. Presto!”

  “What’s it taste like?” the Intended asks, ever the skeptic.

  “I can never really remember. It’s like childbirth. You blank it out. Otherwise you’d never do it again.”

  “Is it bad?” she asks.

  “Gosh yes. The women swear and yell at you. They want revenge.”

  “No, the rum, the pumpkin rum.”

  “Say, it’s awfully good. Christmas you’ll have some.”

  My Intended says she’ll definitely look forward to that.

  My former wife is tired. Kathy’s had mud instead of sleep. Last night she had to deliver calves with a come-along chain taken from the back of her pickup truck. Usually the mothers wait for a blizzard before they drop a calf. You can’t have them lie in the snow but with twenty-three there isn’t enough room in the barn for all of them. You check at midnight and sleep a little and check at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. And you get the chain from the truck. I can’t imagine reaching that far inside, the mother, the pre-life, the cold chain wrapping living flesh and dragging it into our bawling world of snow and mud. But Kathy has a gentle touch; she does tapestry weaving on a floor loom. Some mornings she brings me milk in a metal pail fresh from the barn. Other mornings she tells me to go to hell.

  Her house and garden sprawl across a table of land above the lake, a ravine due west, a lake due south of her farmhouse windows. She says, Sometimes in the garden I hear the cowboys working cattle on the ranch across the ravine; hear them whistling and yelling at the deadheads, “Hey ya! Move along, slutface!”

  Shirt Is Blue us
ed to ride as a hazer, calf roping; he rides an old WWI Fokker now, a grass airstrip here in Alberta and a Frank Lloyd Wright shack on one of the Gulf Islands. He owns real estate from the 1960s, lake lots and cow pastures and woodlots bought dirt cheap. He used to live in a school-bus, eventually covered it in rocks as a secret hideout. Maybe it’s a bomb shelter, an afterlife. Now he has a new palace of stone and hardwood.

  He has cut me in on a deal or two. I owe him. He drinks too much when he ropes—never wants to stop, never wants to go home. He makes great chile relleno, mixes buckets of “Big Bob’s No Problem Bloody Mary Mix” (from Australia direct to Jawbone Lake).

  Your land, says Shirt Is Blue to the city man, a wealthy tanned doctor riding a lawn tractor, a gentleman farmer. That’s a good one, that’s rich. You whites crack me up. Har Har!

  Oh, this is one of those places that wants money, he yells in the posh Seattle restaurant, just before they kick him out into the dead sea lions and dolphin pilings and some kind of vegetable green sky. Har Har!

  A yellow bulldozer heaves in the lake woods and the silver plane floats below my silver cabin on underwater currents and nudges, on whispers of metal. I dream of the drowned plane after the crash, passengers still sitting, collecting bonus points, Air Miles, strapped down like specimens. I row and row across the lake, searching for the plane. The first 45 record I bought in Edmonton down at Melody Lane was Otis Redding’s Dock of the Bay. The song came out right when he died, was a huge hit. I recall studying the 45’s blue Stax label, and I recall the rumours about that song’s lyrics, rumours about his death. His plane fell like an elevator into a blue Wisconsin lake where I later skated. I drove to Clear Lake, Iowa. I was driving across the entire country in winter, roads like frozen rivers.