Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  I’ll catch on with another team.

  Dream on, says Neon the helpful neighbour. Kathy drives a school bus every morning when school is in. It’s one of those stubby versions, maybe twelve seats, sixteen seats. I imagine her hunched over, racing a train, bombing down the road, blonde hair flying in her eyes, giggling as school kids bounce crazily off the waxed benches.

  At the Slipped Disc Soirée Club, Neon sits in with the house band on blues harp, honking and mewling into a taxi dispatcher’s bullet mike. We shoot pool: money breaks, Iowa rules. Neon seems to be in trouble with a dealer acquaintance. He scored some coke on credit, the point being to make money to clear up a previous coke debt. But Neon does a pile himself and with friends, then buys a big German Shepherd as a guard dog. His fun new animal mounts the coffee table and knocks powder and Heineken reeling and what we could salvage from the wet shag did not dent the debts and they’re after my pal Neon. I’ve already lent him money. I can’t give him any more.

  Shirt Is Blue says, My best dog got kicked by the stallion last night. One eye hanging right out.

  Neon says, You take it to the vet?

  Hell yeah I took it to the vet. He gives me a bill for a hundred and eighty dollars and a one-eyed dog.

  Every day I remember the hockey player who lost his eye because of my shot from the point. I remember my ex-wife Kathy crawling out of the barn after her favourite horse kicked her in the breast. Her face contorted, blonde hair loose, trying to crawl away from her horse and trying to hold herself.

  Kathy’s big horses glide past my cabin with heads only showing above the fog, like U-boat conning towers. Dawn clicks in over resident crows, several bald eagles, one hawk, one barred owl, one snowy owl, DDT eggshells and all these eyes in echoing light. Who needs sleep?

  Shirt Is Blue gave up rodeo, at least gave up on rangy-tang broncs, after breaking his left leg and his pelvis. His big horse fell sideways, landing on his leg, all the weight rolling over, rolling, pulling him apart like a wishbone. At the Battle Creek Rodeo a stallion was acting up in his horse-trailer; Shirt Is Blue put his hand in to grab the bridle, and the horse chomped his hand like a sandwich, clear to the bone, infecting it. He remashed his ribs the next day. He still ropes calves though, practising under metal hangar roofs, big ears and big brows and coffee-coloured eyes under steel bolts and steel sheets, stays drinking cases of Labatt’s chemical beer until everyone else is gone. Shirt Is Blue hangs out with married women too much; goes through trucks like I go through shirts, like my teams go through new colour schemes and logos and sports psychologists and soft tissue experts.

  Before the game I smear vaseline over my face. Less friction with the Vaseline, fewer cuts if I get in a fight or clipped by a stick. A brace on my left knee, swearing when a lace breaks. Kathy saw too much of this and got sick of it. My Intended hasn’t seen any of it.

  Give the grinders credit, says the rookie coach, they’re not up on the scoreboard.

  True, mumbles the goalie, they’re on waivers. Grinders of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your teeth. Red light on so often the goalie got sunburnt, hawhaw old joke. A streak goalie, butterfly style. “A smart smart goalie,” they say. “Too smart sometimes.”

  Now what does that mean?

  Listen, says the coach, dump the puck in—hit whoever the fuck touches it, all right? Got it? Hit. Finish the check. A beer a hit.

  The Kansas City forward was on fire and they put him out with an axe. Our bus broke down in New Mexico and tequila was sixty cents a shot; bottles of tequila in Mexico when we slipped over the border were a buck. The K.C. forward had to stop, he lost too many partial plates throwing up into the big river.

  Bep Guidlen was coaching. Better like beer, said Bep, ‘cause no hard stuff from now on. My head was on a swivel trying to watch their quicksilver wingers; my slap shot was not as good as it could be. I practised until I got an inflamed shoulder.

  After the fight the waitress watched my eye change colour: jade, rose, purple. I loved the attention.

  Slamming and screaming in the next condo. The Intended and I are interpreting signs: It is trendy again to beat women. I go out in the hall and am joined by the caretaker’s wife. Their cheque bounced earlier, she tells me. Walls and doors still shaking, she knocks, yells. “Everything okay in there?” Lame line, I know, but we have no training. The racket stops. When their door opens it becomes obvious the woman was beating the crap out of the man, and not vice versa. We are all sheepish, exchange small talk, wrist slappings. Why don’t they move? I seem to repeat this question everywhere I live.

  The beautiful Waitress X laughs and says, “I’m sorry but I cannot take a hurricane named Bob seriously.” I love her because I don’t know her in the slightest. I want to kiss the lines at her eyes. No name for the colour of her eyes. I stare into them and they change. Gold and iron, mica, what? There seems to be light around her. She has a presence, a push and a pull. She makes me feel plugged into something fresh: exotic worlds flying past like asteroids peopled with waitress friends and after-hours staff parties and my fair share of ales and toxins. More than my fair share. And more than just the game of hockey. Her boyfriend Will the jock gambler may come at me any minute with his restaurant league baseball bat. Will will. Let him. This increases the joy somehow. It is a question of an offering to destiny versus just the next clam bake. Statues walk the wino cowtown park, pigeons on them beating like hearts.

  He’s freaked me out a few times, Waitress X says, on the cafe’s deck. I don’t know what’s wrong half the time. He gets so angry. People ask, Has he done this before? Is he going to kill you someday? Are you leaving? Why don’t you leave? It’s hard to just leave. Job-wise things are bad for him. I’ve been telling him to get into something else.

  She groans; her voice seems hoarser now.

  There gets to be a point. I might’ve pissed him off. He didn’t call. He says I didn’t call. He says I’m being childish. He’s being childish. I hate him so much sometimes. I’m a little tired right now. Sorry. I hate him, then I start worrying. Is he all right? Is he going to do something crazy? It wears on you.

  She pauses. This is great bread, she says.

  Oh good, I say.

  Looks like salt flecks on top. How’s your chowder? Is it all right?

  Look over there, I say.

  A TV news camera is panning the restaurant deck, panning us as background for a city story.

  Oh great, I say, and Waitress X knows it’s the same TV station my Intended does freelance work for. Now I’ll be jumpy for days wondering if she’s seen the footage. We have to laugh, even though my stomach hurts.

  I had a dream he was in a metal recliner like an iron dentist’s chair, Waitress X says. Maybe an electric chair. Pennies on his eyes. I worry he’s going to do something crazy. I ask him about his day and he says I ask too many questions. He’s got my car. We used to get along. Just fine. They become a different person; not the person you built them up to be.

  Like me, I think to myself.

  I should call the cops, she says, I could report the car stolen.

  Her face looks troubled at this prospect. She says, But I don’t want it to get like that. I don’t think I should call the cops.

  May’s annual snowstorm drops two feet and closes the Trans-Canada highway. Every May The Calgary Herald calls it a “freak” May snowstorm. How can it be “freak” when it happens every year? Summer starts to feel like a too-thin slice in a sandwich I can’t get my mouth around. No wonder our elders don white shoes and bunny-hop the links of San Diego half the year. My Intended waltzes into our living room, gazing out the picture window with her bright eyes, singing cheerily, LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW, then in a much lower voice: Fucking climate. Let’s move. Let’s pack up and sell everything and just go off to Mexico or somewhere warm.

  Waitress X suddenly climbs a steel railing to the restaurant balcony and I realize she’s younger and in a different world than me. I hardly know what kind of m
usic she likes; I don’t even know if she likes to dance. I’m the lamest dancer. The cook is juggling knives, smiling at her with his big gold teeth. This is her turf and I don’t belong. A parallel life in the same city blocks. Together we walk into the lounge side of her restaurant. A young bartender calls her by name, says, “Your breasts look nice today.” She laughs at him. She’s in a T-shirt and light light bra I just saw her clasp. I’m mad at the guy but don’t want to cause a scene; again, her turf, I’m forced to see we’re not really together. With waitresses and waiters I note a similarity to theatre people, they’re On’ a lot, a little loud, kisses, hugging, flirting, selling themselves as a doomed meringue. Waitress X is appetite while Kathy and my Intended are held back a little, more cautious, politic.

  We’re in a showroom with no furniture: sun in the bay window, very hot, my mouth on her shirt, her hair, her hiked skirt, a tattoo circling her ankle, local juvenile cats and dogs sniffing under the door, wondering what we’re up to.

  “Can you fit me in on your social calendar?” I’m getting sarcastic, a bad sign. Guys are always calling her up for lunch, drinks, as I did.

  “I talk on the phone a lot and do my Jane Fonda and fool around with you. That’s all.” Today she had eight calls during her Fonda tape. She works the sundeck at 4:00 P.M.

  “I dreamed about her,” she says.

  She dreamed of my Intended.

  “I touched her ass and boobs.”

  Too bad women can’t have kids with women. Probably have a better race. I think her dream has changed things.

  “I don’t want to destroy your marriage,” she says.

  “We’re not quite married. We’re between marriages. The anti-marriage.”

  “It’s inevitable she’ll find out.” This is likely true; we’re getting too brazen. I can only think of clichés: I don’t give a shit about marriage but don’t want to hurt anyone. Waitress X knows too many people. This is a fair-sized city but it’s more like a small town; soon we’ll run into someone who knows the Intended or knows me and they’ll see what’s what, be able to smell it on us, the green god of cheap illicit congress. There are some so sensitive they can’t go out to buy smokes without writing an epic poem about it. The implication always seems: I’m so much more feeling than the rest of you louts.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Woman Turning

  The problems in hockey were mental: On the bench in Rochester, panting and peering at the stick’s grain, and I wonder what tree is this stick from? Quebec ash? B.C. fir? How many goals in it? What feller touched a chainsaw to it? Did that shy woman from Vancouver Island cycle by it? And then the coach yells at me to place a few elbows to noses and I fly from tree to bone and I do it pronto. Always a song in my head. Maybe Howling Wolf, the MonoMen, Meat Puppets. Sometimes just a really stupid line like “Be my baby, be my pretty baby.” It’ll be stuck. Some steroid headcase will be wailing on me and I’m humming, “Children behave, that’s what they say when we’re together.” Or else “Son, don’t go . . . near the Indians . . . please stay away.” Now there’s an interesting ditty.

  Pinching in from the blue line, bench shouting BE THERE! BE THERE!—and I catch a puck in the throat. Can’t breathe. I crosscheck 27 in front of our net and somehow put him in perfect position to deflect the puck past our goalie. Everyone stares at me. Mea culpa. I stand up to their forward and he smashes his helmet into my cheekbone, cut; aches for days and I wonder if anything is broken, but at the same time any of it goes down, at the exact same time I’ll think of some ex-girlfriend who sat beside me in school reading about lago, old King Lear, Mr. Big. We mar what’s well, someone says. They say, You must concentrate. You must apply yourself, as if a glue. It’s a bad age. School is so weird. The whole process. Like processed food. One thinks, I can’t lose with the stuff I use and then King Lear meets Maxwell Smart. You’re suddenly under a chaotic Catholic god, from Catholic schools, under kittyhawks and jaegars and black oystercatchers; under them the beach, over them the scratched planet Mars and the pearl mantle of a seagoing bird, its pure wing tips higher than the others.

  The phone rings at my place. The phone rings in several time zones. Everyone is freaking, everyone is flapping their gums.

  “Where’s the goalie?! Have you seen the goalie?” The coach is hyperventilating, his voice gone like on helium: “Where is he!?”

  Our left winger, Milk Truck, spent Christmas in jail. He spent his 18th birthday in jail. Dobozy the goalie, a lanky redhead from Pickle Crow, Ontario, never came home from a night out and missed the flight. Things go better with coke. Wired for days, he loses track of time, forgets to pay his mortgage, his nanny, his phone bill, a tab at the Royal Gorge Golf Club. He has big tabs at every bar in town. Like me, wrecking something solid. It seems like half the team has had impaired charges. The centre smashes 3.5 cars per season, believing in bodychecking while behind the wheel. “Just charge me with the usual,” he says to the police. A free spirit and a high-priced free agent, he favours coke and alcohol and lots of both. He’s been in and out of treatment, rehab, detox. Thinks it’s all BS. I’ve definitely learned my lesson, he announces every few months. He’s been up and down, sideways. Both him and Dobozy have had their paycheques garnisheed. I’ve seen 3-year contracts fly up the nose in about three months.

  “I give a fuck,” they say cryptically. Well what, I wonder. They do? They don’t?

  Where’s Pierre? The body shop says he owes them for the turbo.

  He’s vacating a warrant. He’s pleading not guilty. A Porsche got smashed. Everyone got smashed. They dropped the disorderly conduct charges in Indiana but there was an under-age girl.

  The under-age girl in Indiana?

  No, the other one, the under-age girl in Minnesota.

  The one in the car crash?

  No, that was with the Islanders.

  I can’t keep track of the under-age girl charges. Where is that spaz goalie? !

  Dobozy the goalie runs up a big bill at the Empress Hotel where everyone knows him from junior hockey, and then he just leaves town, stiffs them. He has bar tabs all over the hemisphere. $3000 at just one bar. No one really knows if it’s malicious or just absentmindedness through chemistry. The hotel calls the team office demanding cash. Dobozy forgets utility bills and bank loans. His goalie mask is a skull. He’s a huge Rocky and Bullwinkle fan. After a while you lose an excuse. It can no longer be blamed on youth.

  I always end up sitting by the one guy who has to smoke or has some crawling kingsnake of a flu. Before the game Milk Truck and Dobozy fight over music in the locker room: Metallica versus Hank Williams. After the game they’re trucking rolls of tape and wads of wet paper towel.

  My ribs hurt, a surf of pain when simply blowing my nose or pulling on my socks, and my backhand shot is now useless. The guys say I look like Don King after I towel my hair and I laugh and it hurts to laugh, to breathe. I have more sympathy now for Shirt Is Blue and his smashed rodeo ribs. Just when you get decent at the game, the body packs it in.

  Between periods the network runs a puff-piece on Dobozy, family man grinning for the television camera with his wife and red-headed children. They show his new rec-room, his pool table, his trophies and jerseys. They talk to his wife, an ex-hairdresser, about the charity work, their hobbies, their dog, how much they want to stay in this city after Dobozy ‘hangs them up.’ The family smiles serenely at the expensive lens and machines. After the same game Dobozy is pie-eyed with a new tart at the lounge on 124th. She’s young. She has big hair. For all I know she is another hairdresser.

  “Hey Dobozy, Channel 2 forget to show this part? This part end up on the cutting room floor?”

  “What are they talking about?” the young woman with big hair asks. “Could you please please tell me what they’re talking about?”

  DRIVE TO THE NET! the coach screams, TO THE NET! BE THERE! Going hoarse yelling from the bench.

  I cleaned his clock, kicked his butt, says Milk Truck. Did you see that asshole start it
up, then he turns turtle on me. Chickenshit. Milk Truck skated in front of their bench making chicken noises, “Bruck bruck,” flapping his arms like wings. No one on their side did anything. They looked sheepish. We finally got the boot from the playoffs on Good Friday. No one on the other team expected us to get that far.

  Good Friday? What’s good about it? Milk Truck asks.

  I turn on the hair-dryer and it explodes in a mushroom cloud of talcum powder. My head is white. “Big joke, guys.”

  The reporter kept writing about the goalie letting in too many soft ones, Helen Keller, the red light giving the goalie a sunburn, the usual clever journalese. Milk Truck and the goalie dragged the sputtering reporter into the showers, inserted a red light bulb.

  There was talk of criminal charges after that incident.

  The coach says Well sir, I seen some things. Well sir, I thought I’d seen it all.

  The coach is sleeping on the sly with the blonde woman who does PR and front office. You know eventually one of them will be fired. The question is: Who will be first? We could set up a pool, guess the date. The reporters will not write about that one.

  The GM has a huge face, part meat, part vegetable. Count your fingers after shaking hands with him. This man wouldn’t give you the parsley off his plate, he wouldn’t give a worm to a blind robin, he’d sell a blind man a rat’s asshole for a wedding ring.

  “The franchise is not for sale! We’re not going anywhere!”