“I better not get pregnant,” she frets.
“How? We’re not doing anything?”
“It just has to be near.”
Language buzzes and tide rises and falls with its floating roof of weeds. I shower yet again. In the hotel room Mary lies on her stomach and I discover I am allowed to rub myself in the crease of her ass, but not penetrate. We come to this compromise without a single word. She has done this much before. This must be the arrangement with the policeman in Galway. As well as this, I masturbate ceaselessly in the shower. It doesn’t help, for something palpable is in the air; lovely naked French and Spanish women, a white and red hotel of bubbling pilsner and French food, blood oranges and dark Catalan sausage, sullen heat and beaches and steaming sun, grapes hanging in the vineyard, sex and romance crawling the very air, and I end up with the Irish virgin. Mary starts taking pictures; she puts it in her mouth, inside her cheek, rubbing me off, and it rises again, but never inside. Knowing this will be funny later doesn’t seem to help. I have my hands inside her and she whispers, “Me ma would kill me if she knew.”
On the bristling Persian rug (goats and monkeys!) I rub it lovingly on the Irish woman’s incandescent blue behind, but not inside, just between quivering orbs, moving it all along her, around the world, teasing everywhere I dare but never in, never inside. We try but we cannot quite get to Portugal. We’re both knackered.
Slate roofs of great churches hang over us; gargoyles and pocked lion heads, church walls the colour of old skulls in summer sunlight. Mary makes the sign of the cross each time we pass a church and I can’t find anything on the jukeboxes.
We are shadows falling down a dun continent, hunting for beaches, hunting for the best exchange of U.S. dollars to francs while hissing Moroccans and handsome Basques try to steal the Irish woman from me. Beat panhandlers lie everywhere, emaciated tall blacks on sidewalks sell their strung-out ghost crap.
“It’s so beautiful yet you find something to complain about.”
“So I’m a Philistine: I’m sick of great cathedrals, sick of great art and architecture.”
We seem so close to Africa, to Tangiers and Morocco’s mountains, yet we’re at approximately the same latitude as Green Bay, Wisconsin or Rapid City, South Dakota. This seems impossible.
We eat spicy olla podrida, drink cold Krönenbourg by the gallon, big fun on the continent. The train tunnel is dark, the longest tunnel in Europe or some such thing; Mary the Irish woman opens my pants knowing it will be dark, has it out and the Moor across the compartment flicks on a lighter. They all see us. Hi guys.
In Spain they seem to stay up all night.
“How do they do it?” Mary asks. We keep nodding off.
We prowl dark halls of foreign syllables, heaps of linen leaning; we gnaw on rock-hard rolls that comes with the Madrid room as continental breakfast; we hold our tongues. Gold loaves, gold teeth, gold rivers, gold skin, gold gold gold.
The train crosses plumb-line canals disappearing into the distant dreaming haze of WWI woods. There are too many monuments, too many moments.
95% Of All Who Have Been Baptized
Have Been Baptized Wrong!
It is perhaps not quite rape. Some Fiat with no muffler keeps us awake half the night. The Fiat hurtles at great speed but never seems to get more than a block or two before circling back to us where I labour in my usual allotted and sanctified crease of Mary’s ass, all the way back and all the way forward, teasing her nether lips, the tip as close as I can and back, as close as I can and in a slick millisecond half of my cock is in her. Pearl rivers, marble rivers. She cries out then she is weeping. I apologize weakly and Mary says it’s O.K., she came, her tears a release after these frantic days, miles, minutes. She doesn’t seem to notice I was in at the time she came. Some stud. But the technical virgin is still safe for her Galway policeman, the Irish peeler. I secretly hope Mary pretends to not know and that the earth moved, etc. Neither of us ever mention our brief intimacy, although I believe that she, oh forget it.
CHAPTER 47
Lord Weary’s Castle
The Irish woman and the Canadian jock cross ochre and bleached lands, bending under pathways of lightning on lavender, under castles and elephant hills and clouds the colour of our teeth.
How do you say someone has stolen my luggage? Al guien ha robado mi equipaje.
How do you say I want to be back with my Intended? No esta bien.
Another set of efficient trains, then the mother kangaroo fell from the castle wall. This touching castle in Italy has its own zoo. The mother kangaroo found a hole, was exploring; but she slipped. Her baby, bent in its pouch, died in the fall and the mother broke one of her big hind legs. There is a pause.
Mary asks, What happened then? knowing the answer.
The zookeepers, expressing regret to us in Italian, felt they had to kill the female kangaroo. It was the merciful thing to do. The day after this, the male kangaroo, alone, “was showing signs of depression.” Here the guide spoke carefully, looking at Mary warily, perhaps having been through the same blender. “The male kangaroo threw himself over the castle ramparts.” The castle looks a little like the prison by my lake. I never made it to Lisbon, I never made it to Switzerland. There was a woman named Rita there. I met her in Hampstead. Huge leafy trees. Money. The world changes colour balancing on mountains. I think Kathy must be sleeping now, dreaming. It’s night in Canada. But it’s night here first. They have dibs.
I dream a late night talk show where the kangaroos slouch in swivel chairs, explaining to Waitress X their childhood ambitions, their sad understanding of the grape-fed keepers, their low self esteem. “Do we have a clip?” asks the smiling host.
This Italian zoo story troubles me to no end; but what of my own soap opera cosmogony, or that fellow human who lays his weary head in a vespertine cardboard box; has he not fallen from the castle ramparts? No, clearly he is not a photo-op, he is not as romantic or exotic as this antipodean ménage à trois, the star-crossed marsupials. These three will stick in my memory, in my craw, much longer than yonder sinner.
We aim ourselves back toward Paris. Trains bisect Europe’s charming ordered countryside; obviously they’ve had a decorator in.
There are Basque bombs, Arab bombs, Libyan bombs, PLO bombs, IRA bombs. I understand I have two separate brains, maybe more. In Mill Hill, Mary and I swim an ancient stone pool, a last stop. In a cavernous London train station, the centre of an uncertain empire, I have a surprisingly tearful farewell with Mary. We hold each other: We have somehow travelled from lust to irritation to sincere affection in England’s green and pleasant land.
“It’s been brilliant,” she says. “Great crack,” she says.
“I’ll miss you,” we both say. I’ll never see her again: How many Irish have parted here? How many people have parted from me? I’ll never see them again. The train looks red and festive and ancient. The night boat goes from Liverpool. Mary has a good job and a life to get back to in Dublin, that writhing Viking village on the edge of a world. Weary of frontiers and sweat and passports and fighting for 2nd class seats and Spanish thieves, I head to Heathrow, feeling like a cartoon character with a question mark hovering over my head. I’ve made transatlantic phone calls: I think I know who waits at the other end of this polar thread. Jumbo jets take on fuel, staring in the glass like blunt-nosed beasts, and like Waitress X, I board one home to Canada, to exit fortress Europe, to parachute anew into my old world. This time I’m not kicked off in volcanic Iceland. Our pilot is a woman. This is a first for me. We are pushing air, drones drinking in an aluminum throat; we fly on instruments over the monstrous distant north Atlantic, the old stars and the new stars, a female pilot delivering us exactly to those few lights in the giant darkness escaping under our feet.
PART 4
Breathing Out
A pure river of water,
Moves in the midst of a gold street;
And on either side of the river is a tree
Bearing
twelve manner of fruit
And each yielding her fruit every month
The city walls are jasper
And the twelve gates are twelve pearls
But these are cast out; these are cast out:
Dogs and sorcerers, whoremongers
And crooked agents, ambulance chasers and idolators
And whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
CHAPTER 48
The Cartoon Language of Storms
Dramatic light leaks in the plexiglass portholes: eel-red and blood-blue, quicksilver and reed-green; then the 747 wheels touch, leaving a little something of themselves along the patient tarmac.
So did you have FUN? In FRANCE? She asks this a little coldly, but I understand I’m being given another chance, another stab. En route to the city the air has some real absence to it. My Intended is driving her car, controlling levers and toggles in the dashboard’s silicon thickets. We’re all quiet, expectant: something is up. The windshield reflects our separate eyes until the metal light and hammer-coloured clouds change, then the pool-tint windshield, urgent with hailstones, caves in on our faces. We pick safety glass from our stunned zippers, look up from our small troubles to see a familiar phone booth lift and fly like a missile through Trudy’s Hairstyling and Service Station and Topless Carwash.
“Yikes,” speaks my Intended, almost as a disclaimer. Twisters, common as rivers, as accordions in Omaha, are unheard of in rat-free Alberta. Suddenly everyone here has one, tornadoes speaking in strenuous tongues, heating up like a burning clutch. My fault: my affairs must have caused this, I think, another altar boy flashback. Pink insulation ripped from cabins and trailers now arranges itself on fields of shredded bright mustard.
Where to go? In this one town, just ten miles from the lake, neighbours’ cars are flattened and piled and driven into hardware walls; bumpers and tires and instant car parts dangle on trees like Christmas décor.
We look through the fractured ice-cube windshield as a pretty blonde piano flies through the air playing itself, mystery hands banging doomsday and salvation on the 88s. We both hear the piano’s bass notes rumbling, an ivory orchestra warming up for Wagner, a last crazy polka on the vibrating white and black keyboard before the pristine piece of furniture is cleared for landing and transformed to kindling, a cartoon image but terrifying to the plain talk in your head, the sweat glands in my cold, cold hands. I wish I could play piano. The city radio keeps offering Led Zep’s ominous “Kashmir:” duh -duh - duh, duh - duh - duh .... I decide I must already be deceased.
How can air do this? wonders my Intended aloud. I feel some panic, I’m a palsied coward. A dead broodmare flips past, white eyes open. Behind the cartwheeling horse a black railroad tanker tosses end on end in the trees away from the CN track. An oil well at the edge of town spews streamers and there is black dirt melting in my mouth, oil in my hair, teeth, air filters. There is glass in my lap and dirt in my mouth. It’s like an intriguing Latin movie they edit with an imprecise chainsaw. I flutter back to the new world with such good intentions and it turns on me like a strange dog.
On Main Street my Intended whips the steering wheel; wires and sparking things are stretching like a Dali print. We turn south to Jawbone Lake: waves twisting way up and wild, black clouds moving like landlords, not above the aspens and spruce, but right through indignant trees, at ground level and on a mission. Our big picture window is broken clean in half and my father’s blue sailboat is bashed up and blown into the swamp, but still, it’s not as bad as what we saw driving through town. We hammer plywood and planks on the window and hunker down on the fish-pattern linoleum. I have only tuna and Kraft Dinner in the cupboard, some suspect Saltines from my childhood, and a Granny Smith apple.
We swim, we play Monopoly and Old Maid and Gin, get to know each other again, decompress.
“The thing is, the thing is I want to have children,” she says at the shore, staring uncertainly over the water, “a child.” This is a new one. I try to imagine myself in a paternal pose, smoking a pipe, helping with homework.
She stares at the small waves, every 2 × 6 of the pier moving in rhythm. “Should I go with you? Should I? You don’t have a great track record. I know you. Hell. There it is. Nothing gives. You’re not reliable. I don’t care about getting married. It isn’t that. Oh just forget it please. Please. Just forget it. All the guys I know are goofs. Big fucking goofs! What gives? Nothing gives. Nothing.”
We drink tea and Kool-Aid made with tangy well-water and days later my mother phones me: “Sorry, I forgot your birthday with the tornado and everything.” The Intended and I are still shaking like those rodent canines the rich favour. After a storm one starts again, rebuilds the pier. I’m going to attempt this. In a Paris hotel bugs walked the ceiling and the Irish woman worried I had made her pregnant; in this dozer-bait cabin my Intended worries that I’m the absolute wrong guy, that she’s waited too long. Maybe she has.
Years ago I came home drunk from a late December road trip. I almost missed Christmas, which would not have been the first time. Bad connections. The truth. This was before my divorce from Kathy. Kathy was ill with a knockout flu bug, and was shakily trying to place tiny angels on a Christmas tree she had purchased on her own. The string of bulbs was not working. She had fragrant herbal tea; there was a curl of steam and evening snow scheming at the windows. The light was nice. She was shivering. I felt sudden terrible remorse at this fragile domestic scene, felt I was being handed a vision. I was afraid Kathy could smell all the perfume and smoke from the past few years, the past few minutes, could sense all the waitresses and flames and old torches, the slightly inebriated ghosts in rattling tire-chains, the warm cars running in neutral, in winter dusk, and necking in the snowy lane, then one of us running, Gotta run, perfume still on me, running up to a door and fragrant tea.
“This cold,” she whispered, “straight into my voicebox.”
Chilled, Kathy changed into her flannel nightshirt while I made her a special mug of weak tea with honey and milk, what my English grandmother made for us as kids: Granny’s tea.
“I just hope I can get some sleep tonight,” she said.
“Sleep baby sleep,” I said mimicking some old nursery rhyme.
“You never call me baby anymore,” she muttered, drifting off.
Again I was reminded of creeping and imperceptible deteriorations of spirit, of romance and good intentions just about down the drain.
I want one more chance. Everyone wants one more chance. I don’t want to be like everyone else.
For weeks rogue squalls hang around the city like peroxide headaches; distant storms tethered like fuzzy zeppelins, their mountain weather a blossom tint over us. Here is night’s umbrella; when I am drunk I feel my head is a video camera going down a condo ‘s dark hall, dots and streaks and comets and numbers on the screen. I want to make obscure grainy films. I know my Intended could make a sharp movie. I let my rods and cones drink in whatever they need. I close my eyes, whole skeletons against my eyelids, seeing distaff ghosts in the coat-rack, ghosts in the doorways. I walk out the cabin door and over to the bent farmhouse in the rain and hear my Ex-Wife crying in her tiny bedroom. I recognize the precise tone and intonation: perhaps Neon found our need to be cruel. I sneek home, shoes caked with gumbo, nursing that guilty reflex. Some women I know deal with masculinity as a library card they hope may expire any day now. Hitting the vein, perhaps Neon’s heart takes some minuscule comfort, distraction.
Any mail? I ask, actually believing in the mail as a force for good, or at least a link to some fair and impartial outside world.
No mail, replies my Intended. A power bill.
Any calls? I ask.
No calls. Oh, the phone rang once but whoever it was hung up.
Was it Waitress X? I wonder. Or the woman on the coast who hates me? Now I won’t know love from hate.
From the condo window I see a dark figure, female, approach the phone booth; she shuts the phone booth’s door and turns whit
e as a bride, transformed by light inside her glass and metal walls. My phone rings.
Hello! I croak. I can’t control my voice, my brick throat. I sound like Don Knotts. Hello!
There is no one there again, no voice, no tongue.
You have to choose. Or you wait and then you don’t. In my head Waitress X is becoming the east; she is becoming Toronto in a black jacket not warm enough for winter.
I pace the hardwood. I think about the idea of future income, about buying a Fisher-Price highchair, about eating. I call The Cat long distance. Maybe Slats wants another project. Or Captain Video. Wild Bill Hunter or Rick Bowness or John Chapman with the Flyers. He’s got a nice summer place in Montana. I’ve been there for a beer with Trevor Linden..
“Take a flyer on me.”
“I’ll get back to you. Maybe I’ll take a flyer on you.”
Time: time is running out for me. If I could just do another year or two, I could make a lot of money, the way salaries are going. I could get back what the agent has pilfered or gambled. I need a chance, something to bargain. The right team—I could help, show some young D-Men some tricks. I’m a role model. Well I’m not but I could be.
Forget it. It’s over. I know. I accept my demise, my tongue thick as a blowtorch, as kelp. All over the sweet, humming continent journeymen hockey players sit down in their living rooms and accept their sighing demise, hang up the speed-dial phone, the last link. One attempts bowling, putting, sales, the warehouse, the firehall. The concept of evaporation seems pertinent. There is money out there, there is a smattering of tiny bells from City Hall, a place more beaks than birds. I send in my taxes. I do some major moping, examine maps and real estate ads. Where can I flee? Where is it cheaper? Happier? To celebrate the insecure city’s centennial, Shirt Is Blue takes to his plane to dump fresh manure and his failed country and western records over downtown Calgary. I don’t know much about art but I know what I like. In retirement “villages” they’re dying on the enclosed balconies. They paid earlier but can’t recall the exact arrangements. You call for autumn, you must unlearn what you know.
Salvage King, Ya! Page 22