Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Waitress X likes to tease me. So you killed it, she laughs, cigarette smoke from her mouth in a widening funnel, a triangle so perfect you could pick it up and carry it. She has a thin gold chain and a Guatemalan good luck charm on her wrist, like a cloth bracelet; a good luck charm though she says she has bad luck with guys.

  You killed the dog, she says laughing at me.

  In Philly, garbage was everywhere, garbage blowing off barges, garbage falling from skies. I was not used to it. I drove with the Intended to the famous races in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. My Intended lived part of that year for free in a mansion behind a Vermont orchard, wintering on a houseboat in Key West. People are always giving her great places to stay, giving her jobs. I met her on the road in the desert. The road led to the sea. Her younger brother sent coke in the U.S. Mail. We shuffled into a Saratoga racetrack washroom, her rock-hard coke in a glass bullet. Enough in one chamber for a snort; glass into nostril, do it, do it, push more into the clear chamber, repeat ad nauseum.

  Like Joseph Conrad, my former wife Kathy had a childhood map of distant lands. Kathy jabbed her finger down: I want to go here. Your ex flies to the Azores, your ex flies to southern Portugal and travels to Spain, a blonde hitch-hiking to Pamplona, looking for Ernesto, Lady Brett, a bullfighter.

  She sends you a brisk card: “Spain is slightly extremely crazy. No one seems to sleep or work. There’s no butter with bread. They’re loco, bitter. They spit at each other arguing whether Franco’s in hell or not. They drive like madmen all over the road, through red lights and can’t speak a word of English! Machine guns in the Plaza del Sol. Neo-Disco! No comprendo! Hasta Luego XXX OOO(not nec. in that order) your former squeeze you stupidly mistreated.”

  Your ex takes the train to Germany and is made pregnant by a crazed Prussian climber. I lack her imagination. The climber’s father fought alongside Rommel in the fabled North African sands. In North Africa the climber’s father sweated in the shade of Afrika Korps trucks, ate grit with every meal, fought by the Qattara Depression, surrendering in the shadow of the pyramids. Forty years later Kathy’s climber falls into the heavens not far from Chinaman’s Peak. The north face. The climber hits rock: slate, brown and grey limestone, shaley slopes. Dies in Canada not far from where German POWs waited out the end of the war. Many POWs liked the foothills and mountains of Alberta’s eastern slopes and emigrated back after the war. Lebensraum.

  Now all of us lean into new postwar alignments, now we lean at the polished bar, a flowering in my nose, nostrils seeming to open, a nice fragrance, then the cocaine’s syrup moving down our throat like night and fog. This is what they fought for. Looking out on Saratoga’s Street of Dreams and listening to the latest slum sensations on the jukebox. Nice for a while; cocaine an egocentric drug, a selfish drug: our circle seems important, nothing else. Not the game of hockey, not the million other games at your fingers, not the high-strung high-stepping Saratoga racehorses, not my VISA bills, not the lost money, the cigarette smugglers, the skiptracers, or the rich untouchable Skidmore co-eds driving white Jeeps their fathers gave them. Nothing is important. It feels like we exist in a glowing perfect bubble: my temporarily charmed chemical group of men and women. We feel witty and leave ridiculous tips. No one can touch us now without magic. Is this the new opium? I think so but I can’t recall all the clauses in the contract. Let’s do lunch. Maybe in Austin or Santa Fe. But first another Beck’s please. More screaming chicken wings. Chop, chop!

  Water was never my perfect element; I spring from bed and hop like a bunny down my hewn wooden steps, down to the lake for a morning plunge, dive deep off my rickety pier, and I’m in the water. I like the water, but still I feel a distance, a coldness. I’m a visitor, a guest. I climb out quickly after a brief swim; I wash my body, shock my scalp, but then I get away. As a child, burly jackfish bumped my legs in vast underwater pastures of noxious green weeds and leeches.

  Now I think of the plane down there somewhere, passengers floating beneath my white feet, plane wings dipping and turning like a lazy gyroscope, and I’m uneasy. Their spines must’ve broken on impact with the lake. I hope it was fast. The weeds will take them, shake them out into the next life. The motors ripped away from the plane. Oil traces.

  The RCMP paddle out, take a look, tip their canoe. Yellow firetrucks line the sandy cliff and shore and I find myself thinking, Is it bigger than a bread-basket? They can’t quite locate the plane, the afterlife. Tell us if we’re getting warm. Bodies are waiting, finding out what’s waiting in the future, floating in from the past; now we’re searching the past.

  Neon and Shirt Is Blue show up in a Zodiac with growling twin motors; Neon says they’re going to bring in sonar. Leonard Nimoy will be next. They’ll invent a tourist monster, sell T-shirts. They don’t have to live here with the wandering ghosts and guns and electronic reporters. The dead dog, the dead climber, the dead passengers, the pseudo-bikers.

  Neon hopes to be on TV. In the mirror he practises faces for the media: worry, grief, camaraderie, anger, pity, and just in case, shouts of triumph. YEAH!!! This could be his big break. The quiet lake has become a psychological state of siege, a hanged man submerged below a babbling crowd of divers on the big pier who imply I interrupted their important summer bar-b-q. They feel the plane crash is my fault because I phoned it in.

  Move along, slutface, repeat the cowhands. I move along. I think: In hockey you can’t think too far ahead. We just tried to keep the score respectable. No Indians live here now, says Shirt Is Blue in his Jeep, feeling that, as wary consumers, they’re not sold on the new improved afterlife. We all join the other lost voices and Doubting Thomases, we roll the bones, persevere, maintain, flip flop and fly. Our feeble yellow headlights search ahead for markers, to see what awaits us, finding only an arrow saying You Are Here, and directions into the latest trendy wilderness where a herd of us moves along (move along, slutface) prone to trash and sentiment.

  CHAPTER 8

  Twin Carbs

  Waitress X and I meet at a friend’s gentrified house or a deserted show home by the airport. Oil is way down, real estate is way down: Houses are not selling and people are locked into huge mortgages for a few sheets of drywall, for plaster of Paris; thus the dollar dealers are cleaning up the condo market. The dollar dealers will take a place from you for a dollar so you can walk away from it with clean credit, leave your debts and confidence, leave everything you’ve sunk in behind. Real estate did not turn out to be the goldmine it had been for our parents.

  How to explain a face, the romance of its genetic algebra, its raw power. I see her. I see her walk up and know I can just say Let’s go upstairs. This amazes me, this gift. She’s sharp. She is not a bimbo but she’s a physical person. At work she shows leg. She wears bikini panties; I catch a glimpse of them in the restaurant; I look down her blouse, see straps or shadowy bra.

  “Fashion faux pas,” she jokes when her straps show in public, but she’s obviously not concerned. She enjoys things. She used to be much heavier. She thinks her nose is too large. She has lines at her eyes like mine but I like them. Perhaps because they’re like me. Too much sun and drinking. Appetite. I love her voice. She never seems to sleep, two or three hours a night, runs on nervous energy. Her boyfriend Will climbs in the big window at 4:00 A.M. They argue until six. She sleeps until nine and goes out, leaving him still in her bed. The next night she is up till 5:00 A.M. drinking Spanish champagne after hours in a restaurant. Who is she drinking with? I wonder but I do not ask.

  She quits smoking, her long legs jumping even more. Her quitting surprises me. She just seems like a smoker, an addict. Waitress X loses ten pounds while my Intended gains ten. Neon is losing ten and I’m putting on ten. Perhaps the same ten. All over the city legions of us discuss these fabled ten pounds at some length.

  The religious radio asks, who is the keeper of my soul? I don’t know this. I’ve got the world on a string, I’m working without a net.

  In someone else’s white living room she loo
ses tiny panties to her ankles while looking at me with eyes the colour of light under the lake, in the shot shallows. She knows where the bodies are buried. She settles on my lap like a large bird and her lanky arms and hands undo my pants, reach way under. Swans fly and clouds like fish swim east to Saskatchewan.

  The new pink houses are so close you can hear coughing, cutlery on plates. There are few curtains. Neighbours yell through the windows to each other: Can I borrow $5? Got any eggs? While Waitress X wanders past the bay window with her skin-tone bra in her hand, always restless, hopping. She can’t sit still, can’t stay in one place, with one person.

  I phone her and her boyfriend answers, handing the phone to her suspiciously. How to explain this one? Her mind turns. She’s smart. I know she’ll think of something good. Shirt Is Blue’s sheepdog disapproves of her, definitely likes the Intended better. Should I take that as able advice? Later I wash myself at the bathroom sink, hurrying but trying not to seem in a hurry. Her Mickey Mouse watch is always wrong. It will get us in trouble. Trouble is not my middle name. How to make this clear. It finds me but I hate it.

  “Are you scared of him?”

  “Not really,” she says, “I’ve known him so long.”

  They’re high school sweethearts, which can be a moderately tough gig.

  “Are you scared of me?” she asks.

  Certainly I am; she makes me nervous.

  Turn around, I ask, please turn around. That way. She turns her back to me and each button is slow, new to my fingers and sore thumb. My hands are on her shoulders, her head bent forward. I lean into her naked neck and want to collapse. I push the white material forward, making her shoulders bare, biting her bare shoulders, one hand around her brown perfumed belly while my other hand runs the line of her spine, counting, courting. Why do I now seem to worship backs? The curving travel, the small, the hollow, a natural resting place, a pause, and the tiny gap between her lower back and the flowered elastic edge of her underwear, flimsy and low, the last article in the universe. Delay. Delay.

  Gale force winds are whipping off the mountains, putting me in mind of Lear and guilt, madness and nakedness on the blown heaths. Branches fracture on the porch, leaves strewn, a Globe & Mail wet and spread and see-through. I see you. There’s an iron-rail widow’s walk on the peak of this Queen Anne house. From up here cars seem a mile below, the trees a barrier you could just float over. I see shorn foothills to the north, cleaved mountains veiled to the west, an arsonist’s fire on Nose Hill yielding smoking fields of fire, and shortgrass plains rolling forever to the east. At times this city’s landscape is a yoke on my neck; it’s not my home town but it’s basically where I’m from. The foothills are still unusually green with rain, for summer is a series of false starts, some limbo between seasons, between a real decision.

  You’re strange, Waitress X said at first, initially nervous, but later saying, You’re strange, and laughing at me. I notice the change in her. She’s not as impressed.

  Look around for evidence, she says over and over, search and destroy.

  This is our despicable joke: search and destroy. I hide Spanish bottles, Waitress X’s ashes and altered landscape, the air we breathe in to drive us. The pastel palace of sin perches way up on a hill and grey stucco homes squat below in what was swamp before the war. There is no such thing as zoning, and shacks surround venerable brick mansions; ugly cement apartments dwarf art deco walkups.

  The foothills are greener than they can be, the omens contradictory. Cottonwood leaves fly, Waitress X drives away without a muffler and clouds walk in from seething mountains. From the porch I watch her leave me and I watch the clumsy clouds approach, waiting for some act that either has not started or has not ended, then I go in and I close the weatherproof glass, to detach, shelter myself from whatever that act is.

  Back when I was on the road more often, my Intended, a disciple of altered light, would routinely see three movies in one day. Almost every single film was ‘boy meets girl.’ Spinal Tap might be the one exception that proves the rule.

  I can’t listen to this record. Everyone adores him but B.B. King is the most boring, polite, predictable guitarist on this planet, his work the equivalent of turning a bolt on the assembly line, making the same spot-weld for thirty years. Give me Otis Rush or Peter Green any day. Hubert Sumlin or Duke Levine. Wind from the Rockies roughs up the last roseate leaves, the moon slides in silk under blacksmith hammers, and the blues guitar should have some sort of raucous answer. My heart is not unquiet, it is mumbling, just let me sleep. I sleep. I sleep. I sleep.

  Blinds crash open and I wake up confused, expecting Waitress X’s boyfriend wanting to kill. Instead my Intended is staring at me like a shirtless vampire.

  “I dreamed you had an affair. The little slut.”

  “What was she like? “ I’m truly interested and apprehensive. My Intended has a temper, violent tendencies, Irish and Scottish and Viking blood.

  “I’m still mad at you. I had a .22 and I was going to use it.”

  “On her?” I ask hopefully.

  “On you.”

  “A rifle?”

  “I don’t know. You and your fucking details. I just know I had a .22.1 met you at the bar with two women, there were introductions, and I just knew you’d fooled around with this one woman.”

  All the women I know are dreaming of each other. Soon they’ll recognize each other on the avenue, organize box socials, 12-step garage sales, a 1-800 crisis line.

  My fortune cookie:

  You Think That It Is a Secret, But It Has Never Been One.

  “These never make any sense to me,” says my Intended, “and you take them so seriously.”

  With the Intended I have to stop myself from blurting, Guess what the waitress told me?

  They buy the same brand of black currant jam, the same deli’s pepper pâté, they mention identical indignities in the newspaper. “Hey, did you see this kook in Kansas? Took her head right off. Have they never heard of dispute resolution? Divorce?”

  Waitress X is getting to know the Intended but not the other way. Waitress X likes her more and more now and likes me less and less. My guard is always up; watch what you say. I’m nervous in the service. I have to feed Shirt Is Blue’s cousin’s menagerie and bike there in a sweat. I run around town. I eat spinach pizza with Waitress X and less than an hour later meet my Intended for platters of scorching Mexican food. I’m drinking like crazy, doing Rolaids by the gross. I’ve got to stop. This is crazy. I know my future is with my Intended. She’s subtle and brainy. She can be depended on. Hers is an ordered world: she inherits this from her family, her friends, fellow workers. She believes you must knife butter from the side of the slab; to slice from the top is a sign of anarchy. This may be exactly what I need. We go for rambling walks along the river, we ski the rocks at Lake Louise on rental skis and don’t care if they’re scratched; we hit Happy Hour at the Prairie Dog Inn and whack a cockroach or two there. These are reassuring rituals. I never know what Waitress X is going to do. I never know when she’s home, when I can call her. Trees with late light picking one beyond the others, telling a story. Why can’t I look ahead? Why can’t I grab a brain? Of course part of me doesn’t want to grab a brain. Part of my brain prefers not to see the gleaming escalator’s imagined end.

  I phone Waitress X and there is no answer. I hate that hollow repeating sound. I have a craving to talk to her but can’t call after a certain hour. I want her damaged voice. We’ve put too many sentences together, put 2 + 2 together. You’re funny, she said.

  “You okay?” My Intended asks in the living room. Her eyes move with concern, her eyes on me.

  “Yeah. My stomach feels a little weird.” The palace invaded.

  I think how easily Waitress X’s clothes fly off. Loves men, she says. I think of her fucking around and get mad, but I also realize I have no right for that’s exactly what we’re doing: fucking around. Lying around and driving around and fucking around.

  No
answer Monday morning. I haven’t talked to her in days and I get pissed off listening to it RING RING RING. Where the hell is she? Loves men. Yeah yeah. I want it to stop with ME! NOW I identify with her boyfriend Will. Waitress X is driving her Newfoundland guy’s Mustang. He gave her money to fix the tape deck. Something seems fishy. It needs a muffler. She’s not telling me the whole story.

  I work out a little at the local gym; some buffed out guy with bad acne is selling three kinds of steroids from the back of his Pinto.

  I can never decide whether to call again or cut things dead. I know I should stop, cut out. Waitress X seems cooler because I didn’t come over after her boyfriend hit her. How was I to know? I phoned her and I had no answer. I’m not a mind-reader. As with Bonita, things are not the same. I called Waitress X (too late) and no answer was to be had. Like her insisting the same thing to me.

  “I called you,” she said to me. “Honest, I did.”

  We keep trying to prove something to each other and we keep failing in doing so.

  Several seasons ago I walked striated side streets in Saratoga Springs, our modern asphalt frayed in patches, baring round irregular stones, not cobbles or bricks, but stones like ostrich eggs, stolen from a streambed, a good doomed fishing stream, and laid as a road centuries ago. Some wooden houses there have a look of New Orleans scrollwork about them. Above one aged coach house a chrome shopping cart somehow flown to roost in high branches, one dead world staring up at the other through ruined leaves. I saw a rare red fox on a trail, a giant pileated woodpecker in snowy branches, and a bald eagle wintering over; yellow legs in a giant leaning of trees. I saw where a train had wrecked and left blurred slabs of marble on the stream bottom.