As I wash my hands in an enamel basin a dead passenger washes up from the plane, from the Turbo-Arrow, water rippling over his face, into his open mouth like gin. We’re all passengers, all floating. I get on the party line again, holler into static.
By Shirt Is Blue’s place we watch a horned owl hit a snowshoe rabbit from behind, take its head right off. I have sympathy, decide this is a pertinent message. The message: if today is your birthday you are intuitive, a natural athlete, sensual, unorthodox and stubborn. Cycle highlights change, romance, travel. Major domestic adjustments can be expected, could relate to residence and marital status. Your lawn will catch fire. Like a snowshoe rabbit, you have lost your head.
CHAPTER 31
I Took Scars
My head got hit by a stick last night, a forward trying to go around me lifted his stick and caught me. I didn’t notice it until shampooing in the morning, a tender welt announcing itself in the hairline just behind my temple. I start wearing a helmet again. My thoughts are scrambled. The patio tables are crawling and the sky, a yellow shell, flexes. I read the paper like my father, read papers from three different cities. I took scars, became infatuated with aloe vera, Vitamin E, a woman to fix my face.
The condo window in late fall: cars move under us like iron filings doing the locomotion; cars plough into each other on the hill for no reason, rocking over the curb and slicing fenders through a small mountain of corn for sale on the empty lot. The hawker flees as a Chevrolet looms sideways, a red Buick powering it along like a bad dance partner; they can’t stop, mash magically into another car, skating away in slow motion from the corn mountain.
Traffic backs up the hill, police lights smeared in rain and then in snow. Women walk by with armfuls of Taber corn, a last hidden taste of summer, while cottonwood leaves crumple, turn into themselves like people in winter; the branch gives them up in fingerprints of rain and then we wake to crystals of snow, to their goon saying, you and me. A coach touches my shoulder and I have to learn winter over again each and every year. I can never really remember winter; the change seems impossible. Our windows fog, then go to frost under one huge cloud the grey of swimming mammals. We look like Russia again and I’m plugging in the car’s block heater, I am sleeping on the Winnipeg couch. I’m moving. Away. Go. Romance makes some realization about itself inside this astringent season but that makes little difference: Waitress X is the death rattle of romance. He pops me in the temple and I enter a new republic. What I have done to women is now being done to me. You’re not allowed to lose. I think it’s in the contract. The diabetic general manager calls me up to his office full of ice cream and posters of Sonny Listen’s unquiet ghost and there I am served memory like a burning dessert.
PART 2
Joy Division
Or look at me—how large and fine I am—
a goddess bore me, and my father reigned,
yet I too have my destiny and death:
either at sunrise, night, or at high noon,
some warrior will spear me down in the lines.
—Robert Lowell, “The Killing of Lykaon.”
CHAPTER 32
Saltwater Kill Zones
I drove from the sugar beets of southern Alberta to play semi-pro in Seattle; this is well before the Thunderbirds existed. For a time Vancouver kept a farm club there. In 1920 the Seattle Metropolitans lost the Stanley Cup final to the Ottawa Senators. In Seattle I caught a frozen puck in the Adam’s apple; next day in the shower my voice sounded like Howling Wolf doing “Smokestack Lightning.” I kind of liked it. Maybe I’ll cut a blues record for Alligator. Seattle could be just the thing. Maybe I’ll forget Waitress X. Maybe the anterior cruciate ligament in my knee will put itself back together.
Fuck this is a chippy team.
Mouthy assholes.
Ref’s not calling anything, guys: lay on the lumber.
That winger sticks me again I’m shoving the blade of my stick to his tonsils.
The ref pulled us apart before I got mine in and I kept trying to get back at the other guy, shoving away the ref and circling back, grabbed again, the ref wouldn’t let me at the other guy and I was so wound up I clocked the ref to get rid of him and then clobbered the other joker who thought he was scot free. Sweater down, punch up, punch up, punch up. This should make Don Cherry’s video, I thought, as they pulled me off, got me to the end of the rink. Two cops waiting on me. The Seattle paper, in a rare instance of hockey coverage, called it a donny-brook, a melee, a brouhaha, a team malaise, the sportswriters favouring an international vocabulary. I was charged with assaulting a referee and a linesman. I don’t recall the second party. A policeman’s nose was broken by a fan. I didn’t do that.
There were hundreds of women at games in Seattle but they looked heavy metal: too much makeup, bleached dead hair, speed, leatherette, bad teeth, etc. I found the crowd obnoxious. They mouthed an amazing noise when we scored but they had no appreciation for fine plays, thought or dekes; they didn’t know the rules, the niceties; they simply desired hick farmboy minor league blood to fall from me like syrup. They wanted dumb Canucks to hit each other with sticks. They waited outside but I was gone, my hand wrapped in a bag of frozen vegetables.
I felt sorry for the coach: French, erudite, ex -NHL. He still had the Montreal-tailored suits and stuck now with bozos like me. My partner on defence was a nice guy, working as a shake-cutter up on Vancouver Island every summer. My partner took an elegant slapshot to the mouth; his upper teeth on one side dead now. Jesus, the intern said, I don’t know what to do with this mess. It won’t happen to me. Knock on wood (my head). We got down to three defence. I was skating so much I thought I’d lose my lunch. Where the rivers hit the saltwater bay is a shifting kill zone.
The fans were way wilder than in Canada: by the second period the mossy modernist arena was beating like a hilltop tavern. When the tiny contingent from the other city dared to cheer their team’s goal, full beer cups rained on them and more fights broiled in the crowd than on ice. My first goal in the States was on the road. Eleven thousand pisstanks were booing, yelling, “Brutal!” I was thrilled at the attention, feeling an odd unrequited kinship, more intimate than affection.
“You’re not getting any younger, Bub.”
“I’ve never heard that put so eloquently.”
“Let’s kick ass. I hate these guys. Let’s get that pretty boy.”
“Let’s win this, boys.”
“No prizes for coming in second.”
“Winners go to the bar and get fucked, losers go home and fuck their wives,” says Al.
“Say what?”
Al, a veteran, used to have an Afro; his teeth and Afro went at twenty-one, hair coming out in big chunks, scaring the hell out of him, and his panicky barber refused to work on him, perhaps fearing a lawsuit. One night our goalie let in about four soft goals. Al shot the puck at our own goalie: “See if you can stop this one.” The goalie chased him down the ice, his stick up like a hatchet, the crowd killing themselves.
The ref calls spearing on Rich, my partner on defence. The other guy actually speared him but the ref has to guess, trying to keep control of the game. The two players scrap a bit and both get tossed. Rich jumps the other guy in the tunnel. I hold the door closed and Rich, not a big guy, goes ballistic on him. The other guy’s girlfriend is screaming, hanging on the rail above; she finally jumps right onto Rich’s neck, then is thrown to the side where she hits a bench hard. The ref is now screaming at me and with a shrug I open the door, implying all you had to do was ask nice.
Next night it’s the same. The guy can’t stand up and they give me a tripping call. His stick moved in the air, a slow propeller biting into my neck and face. I thought again of marriage, of a second marriage. I feel good after a game usually. At the dinner the Navy guy insulted the Intended. The jarhead opened his mouth again. I hit that mouth and cops deem we exist. We had to go to another club. Condition is playing. Great band. Next song we dance, I tell her, next song we danc
e. The drummer floats in cigarillo smoke, a cross-eyed and bald ghost staring down his tom-toms. The guitarist is Frankenstein with a Rickenbacher beside a woman on Farfisa filling a buxom cocktail dress, her wild voice yodelling St. James Infirmary. Tonight’s drink special was the Slippery Nipple, $2.75. The band cooks, vamping through “Swamp Walk,” “Ghost Train,” “Beat Me Daddy.” My Intended and I do the Swim, the Twist, the Klaus Kinski. We’re getting along, we’re an item again. Everything’s rosy.
“Go away,” she mumbles through her closed door the next day, “I’m doing something.” She is half joking and half serious. Does that mean we’re now half an item? I don’t always understand her. A ladybug tiptoes my shirt; this means good luck so I leave it. It tickles as it moves over me, giving me luck. As children we sang in the sunny yard:
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.
What could that have meant to us, informing an insect of domestic tragedy? A goddess bore me, my father reigned: who teaches us what we sing in buzzing backyards, what we know? Why does the brain keep what it keeps on the back burner? Go away, one may say, and something else large and fine speaks up for you, like a number on a stripped jukebox: Never happen, something whispers, never going to fucking happen.
“Taking your Antabuse?” the assistant coach asks.
Sure. Oh yeah. Under control.
The grizzled defenceman grins around his post-game cigar, says, “Wayne’s girlfriend says Give me twelve inches and hurt me, so he fucks her six times and hits her in the face.”
You ride the buses and for what? Some newspaper clippings and a nose that doesn’t work right anymore, a fucking deviated pain in the ass, a deviated knee bone connected to the deviated leg bone to the deviated brainpan.
CHAPTER 33
The Bickersons Reconnoitre
the Kill Zones
Well if you don’t, then I’m taking the cat and leaving on the first Greyhound.”
“There is no Greyhound here, it’s a subsidiary, Pacific Coach Lines, Grey Goose, I don’t know.” I was trying to clarify things.
“O.K., I’m leaving on the first Greyhound subsidiary out of here. All right, Mr. Picky? Now are you happy?”
Yes: Now I’m so happy. Everyone’s happy now.
My Intended and I boycott South African wine, which is not difficult, as I never drink wine. Meanwhile back at the ranch, it is felt the candidate is not suitable for leader as he is Jewish. I watch the news. The Aryan Nation wants a homeland, for whites only, from Alberta to Utah. It is not said what will become of the Indians and their Lysol. They are intruders, they are not important. Nor am I buying Krugerrands.
Trees bunch like cauliflower, while the busboys seem to be wearing white dentist tops. A huge shadow bisects the outside wall; an Oriental paper fish swinging like a hanged man, its shadow larger than the actual object, troubling the side of my vision. “Can we talk?” she asks. Another scar by my eye. She is pregnant? I can’t believe it. It has happened in every city I’ve lived in. Another layer of sediment, strata, coquina, a zone of weathering. I feel now like dead hair around a woman’s garden. Fruit has lost its taste. A woman asks at the next table, “Was that true of all your past lives?”
“I’ll be right back with your change!” sings the waitress.
Your change.
I sat in the airport bar on some kind of green snakeskin couch. Merry Christmas, a woman said, pulling cash from a paper bag. She gave money to everyone. She ran out of $100 bills, apologized for giving $50 bills. People ran in, people phoned friends; it was a brief circus. The uniforms stopped her. She broke some unspoken law.
“It’s just pictures of dead men,” she said. “Now everyone is in better spirits.” She tried to give a fifty to “Reefer” the drug-sniffing dog while a man in a bowling shirt looked at me sadly, asking: “That a Hawaiian tan or that a Mexican tan?”
Between periods it’s dead quiet; we can hear the Zamboni prowling the ice, making it new, giving us another chance. The goalie smokes between periods, like Eddie Mio used to with the Oilers. An older player smokes, his helmet still on, smoke collecting under his half-visor. We’re down 4-1. We can do it! Let’s get a quick one!
We go out and they get two quick ones. We lose II-I. My new skates are too small, my toenails are bleeding after the game.
I figured it out; I had played in front of 347 goalies. I could have 12,000 hours inside a helmet but I didn’t wear a helmet until the concussion in Mobile. Or was it Memphis?
In November I wake to bass foghorns, groggy. What is that? Clouds like rapids and fish hang in stream turns, thinking, spawning. You walk the woods and webs of spiders are there in the damp dawn like laundry stretched on each bush, an architect at each centre. And the guts are pulled from the fish I eat, and mussels from the shell; tide from the shores and husband from wife.
You get along with the ex?
Pretty good, pretty good. You?
Oh yeah, good. Denis, what about you and your ex?
Not too bad. Keith, how’s that going with you?
Great, great, we may get back together. She just doesn’t know it yet.
Terry, you get to see your little girl?
Oh sure, no problem.
And so it goes down the entire bench: terrific, no prob, not bad, can’t complain; almost to a man, separated or divorced and falling over each other to date the mawkish models from the celebrity golf tournament.
Strangely, I miss Montana, which has never been my home. I miss the badlands of Alberta. I remember we were on the back steps east of the buffalo jump, and my Ex-Wife Kathy had the pack of wild dogs in her scope; her farm dog, a German Shepherd had joined the gang, killing calves, breaking another one of those laws. The weathervane roosters spinning. Kathy shot her own dog first, then shot them all, from a quarter mile away. A sunny day. We walked down there and we kicked them into the ditch. It was not quite the same as burying Ubo above the Ghost River.
The blonde woman bartending knows us as a couple. She does not even recognize me when I stroll in alone. To be single is to be more aware, angular, more depressed. Sometimes I just want to put sheet metal in outer space, be Salesman of the Year, find a new career in aviation. I want a name in stone, a small town evident on my face.
The moon hums its same five-and-dime tune and I stare up at that big innocent eye knowing someday I’ll sheathe it in aluminum. I’ll catch on. But I refuse to think about coaching, scouting or colour commentary. I want a clean break when it’s done. I’m not even going to watch a game.
On the phone Kathy says I am subdued. What’s on your mind, she asks. I’m thinking, O.K.? Is that not all right? My Ex-Wife has named a pig Dr. Kissinger; she looks forward to slitting its throat. I don’t want to coach. Maybe I could coach.
CHAPTER 34
The Fall
In bed Waitress X once told me, “I was twenty-one. A consenting adult. I was stupid. He bought me all my clothes.” She whispered. “I never bought any clothes. It wasn’t cute, it was sleazy.”
Of course I love a hint of a problem in the past, a slight touch of sordid decadence, some violence. I’ll be her healing force, her saint in an ancient Volvo, wanting to curve up into her, to have multi-rewards. My illegal bride, my underground bride.
“I’ve been thrown down so many stairs,” she said, “that’s probably why my brain’s not right.” She laughed at this. She had purple around her eyes, pulled on matching purple tights.
December in Washington state: I think of fish returning on all sides of the city, an archipelago of rivers and tributaries and kill zones and kings. Stream levels are low with the arctic cold front yet steelheads have moved into them, Muckle-shoots netting up to 3000. There are fish by Flaming Geyser, fish up the Hoh River, fish over the plunking bars of the Skagit, the Snohomish, fish up to the mouth of Tokul Creek. Gillnetters drive to water along Oil City Road, Tulalips plumb the saltwater where river mouths meet bays, the kill zones. Ice still g
rinding on the Nooksack but the fish are returning. The kings run, the fish are salvage kings. No one on the Seattle team makes the NHL. Not one. My Intended is in the tiny attic bedroom reading Viet Cong memoirs. I think of all the tripwire vets on the Olympic Peninsula, still in their jungle, their private war. We live in the U District. She turns in the mirror to look at herself and weeps. I open a cold Tsing Tao. Again we’re not talking. Something I said in an interview, or something she imagines I said. Or perhaps something I neglected to say. The future recedes like a water mirage on the highway.
And despite my learned advice, the Intended keeps buying one-dollar lottery tickets, that pathetic tax on the poor; she watches Ifs A Wonderful Life in black and white over and over, in tears every single time. She is addicted to Capra movies, any movies: John Ford, Kurosawa, German flicks, Czech, Spanish, Chinese, Polish, Icelandic, Joy Division videos, porn, Disney, any screen. Her eyes get the colour of lost channels bouncing into space, the shade of some lost childhood country.
When I told her, that for insurance reasons, real Christmas trees weren’t allowed in her building, she nearly broke up. I felt it was my fault. She felt it was my fault. When mad at me she drives backroads to Bragg Creek listening to the Stones full blast. She used to like Mick, now finds Keith more interesting. She keeps checking her breasts. There is a family history: brain tumors and breast lumps and dead family.
“I ordered the pizza,” she says in all seriousness, “so you do the dishes, O.K.?” Good diet. The pizza tastes like wallpaper paste. There is blue light on the inside of her legs.
You O.K.? I ask.
You big meanie, she says to me, slightly hostile after her orgasm, her first since the procedure. Her hair up: Looks good, I say. She pulls it down: I don’t care for French braid, she says. Blames me for the abortion. I can’t let on anything. I’m in low-rent grief. No one gives you credit. They think you’re made of kevlar and the wind pushes its mountain perfume like breath from a lead statue.
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