God bless, the Cajun singer sighs at the end, you drive carefully now. He’s trying to do right but his ragged voice betrays him in the clutch; saying the same sane words so often they’ve become ghosts. God. Bless. Drive. Carefully.
How many times he has warned us, blessing those who insist on taking the wheel, those who draw jacks, ease crabbed hands beneath the garment, spin wildly through the volcanoes and mountains that lie on our lost childhood maps. I think of all the dances and all the nuns and chaper-ones with their wooden rulers. They don’t need to keep us apart. We do all right with that on our own.
CHAPTER 52
Hoarse Latitudes
In that charged generous microscope of a year 10:00 P.M. or 2:00 A.M. became the same; they could tell I was drunk and I knew they could tell. I can see but do nothing save wait for the glass highrises to borrow that beautiful hue of nocturnal cobalt. Where did I leave my PV544, my humpback vehicle? Will the starter start? Did we pay the bar bill? It’s freezing, 38 below zero and Volvo follows Volvo, pale as horses, a couple. Moon-riddled blue trees, Mardi Gras faces in a great yellow sky and my cream car makes me feel like Gatsby’s kid brother. The subtle horsepower, that cream colour—like there’s no original sin. Hate is a ruined auto. Where do tire treads go? No one knows, says Andy Rooney. My friend is on a $5000 a month retainer. I don’t even know what he toils at. He jogs the Crow River at lunch. He plays racquetball and his stocks always work out; he is married and has three upwardly mobile women separating themselves from their customized underthings. All of them employ the phrase “executive class” without chagrin. Blinking, my friend wears an amazed look, always a smile; he has blond eyelashes, a ‘Shelter Corporation.’ Did I choose the wrong road? I ask myself. Career-wise? I don’t have a ‘Shelter Corporation.’ I have a puck signed by Rocket Richard I found at Goodwill, a quiet shingled cottage, and blocks to go before I sleep away the million tiny bribes of a day. I ask again: Am I on the wrong road? Did I lose my way?
A chocolate dark grizzly is making a career killing calves southwest of the lake. The glittering horses and crows are appropriately restless. The Talwin dealers are knocking each other off northeast of the lake, downsizing. It’s like a shooting gallery and I am in the middle. In the past I have done a little hunting, a little dealing, but I am wary of both now. I keep a .22 in the outhouse with the beautiful resident spiders.
Neon the starving artist takes to a motel, to Asia, to meditate, to do mushrooms, anything to avoid the white trash that is hearkening for him, trying to add him to their résumé.
I got a letter postmarked Encinitas, from my Zen landlady in the orchards of California, a dispatch from sunny America. She wonders do I remember that young surfer that drowned in front of my eyes? Surfer Joe. I remember. Had I heard his body was stolen from the airport, taken in a purple hearse and burned in the desert at Joshua Tree? She hoped I wasn’t too upset by my stay in California, that I’d return. Her cancer has returned to latch on to her bones like fruit. Her new trees—I helped plant them with fishmeal, intimate with the loam—they’re very tall now. She views them as a monument to herself. What I think: Monuments to me. Like when I went to France: Now that monument exists because I stood by it.
I stroll up aisle one and down aisle two, and do this about twelve times. I pay a woman in white and in this way I can eat. I ask the unemployed geologist, Any work in Libya, Kuwait, places like that? There is some spasm of adolescent violence in the parking lot. Now a young person lies where a car would like to park. The geologist says, “I’m not taking a job in rag-head country, in rugrider country.” We gracefully abandon our history of employment opportunities. We abandon logic, future travel plans; we abandon whole planets. How about those Flames? Exactly which flames?
Times one thinks: Is this my fuzzy penance? Is this what they warned us of all those withering Sundays at the Cathedral? Things have goofed up on me. I drive and I pull in from the Interstate into hamburger midnights, main streets of Montana watching out for the black & whites, the ghosts, the radar and antennae and satellites over the land of the free and the dead, the shifting eyes and crewcuts and legs sweating on the seats of genuine Corinthian leather. We head down to the big Helix Hotel, catch the latest reincarnation of say Hank Snow or Elmore James on an over-driven Hamer lead guitar, a bottleneck slide, open D tuning, hoppy New Zealand beer on special. Soon come we’re sloppy drunk at the blues club, scarfing chicken wings and carrots and angels on horseback.
“He has a different sound, you know what I’m saying? Doesn’t squeeze the high ? all the time.”
They’re doing a thrash version of “Born Under A Bad Sign:” “Bad luck and trouble, my only friend...” At this exact point his tube amp explodes, the back melting, giving off firecracker sounds. This makes me think: some people trust only in tragedy. I wonder if this is not true of me, some latent Celtic ghost of me addicted to things falling apart, blues going out of tune, polychrome smoke and explosions.
To change your spots, to make the past obey, lie down like a pet, a favoured spaniel: this should be easy; pruning the tragedies-in-the-making, to settle for luck.
Yes, board that bus or golden train away from your childhood bungalow or your first young wife and you think, Now I’m done with all this, and are right but not in any way you know. Eventually you’ll crawl an ugly carpet wishing that shining train never left the station, wishing to dip your burning face once more in the clear childhood river, to ride your bike to the Public Beach concession for a bottle of Creme Soda, bats veering around the one purple street lamp to negotiate with the insects of night. After the lovely Mexican woman has hung up on you, pound the basement floor with your fists, try to really hurt that ugly carpet. After Waitress X dumps you: ditto. I had a crush on my Grade Six teacher; her wedding that year did not change this one iota, it seemed off in another land. The song “To Sir With Love” brought tears to my eyes: it was about her. With some fury we chased her bridal car outside the church and she laughed and blushed in the window. I don’t remember a husband even being there. She married me, took my Grade Six body in. In Grade Seven the radio sang “kiss him and hug him and kiss him” all summer long and I hoped Mary Jane in Jasper was listening. I saw her in September and we necked down in the ravine. She was listening. Was it a girl group? Phil Spector? Leslie Gore? I can’t remember but now there is a few thou of body damage and insurance won’t cough up, insurance won’t cover the nut. As a kid I picked hazelnuts and wild blueberries, saskatoons and strawberries with real cream from the hillbilly farm on the curve of the road, then the first cigarette, the last clean breath of youth. We built huge cigarettes from hollow reeds and desiccated poplar leaves. The family dentist said what in tarnation is this black stuff on your teeth? You’re listening to “Hot Smoke and Sassafras.” You’re out fumbling in the middle of the mandatory minor evils and the parents would need night goggles; they can’t see. You have no real form to them yet. Their sense of time passing is utterly different, stalled. The idea of you in diapers is too vivid still, it’s hard to reconcile that with you into that schoolgirl’s foreign bra straps, her mysterious new neck. They find the pearl earring and the frost-white lip gloss outside your window. Mouths everywhere. Androgynous airports. Footsteps. I still want to neck down in the ravine, but the ravine has receded. I attempt to be nicer to my parents, to write old friends, to be kinder to my Intended. The ravine evades me.
My age: Now I meet young women who complain that their mother is going crazy, is running around and suctioning cocaine with unsavoury sorts in bronze Gran Torinos. There is obviously a new set of parents out there. This moment I am struggling to imagine my seventy-year-old mother cavorting with pharmaceuticals and car-phone sleaze and I am not being successful; I am not coming up with a viable picture. Instead I’m becoming more judgemental, cranky.
CHAPTER 53
Chimney
My dead men and women are not strapped in as I imagined them: they did not die on impact in neat orderly rows. Don’t look at t
heir faces, the police divers told me weeks earlier.
Drifting down into the silt sandbars I discovered a dozen passengers who scraped and clawed and crawled over each other believing they alone must escape the floatplane that did not float and they alone must purchase air for their panicked hearts. Believing in themselves, men and women fought like Gurkhas, but they did not escape what came looking for them.
I knew they were down there, but for a long time I could not find them. I would stop the oars and drift sideways, thinking; I rowed back and forth and began to think of them as close friends hiding, like when we were children at the meadow playing Kick the Can or Hide and Seek. Games without consequence.
One morning my lake is a glass bottom boat. My skiff crossing the pristine water at random angles and I spy the drowned plane where it lies—west of the ski jump, submerged offshore of the abandoned Friends of Berlin nudist camp.
In wincing glacial water I hang onto my rowboat with one hand, just my nose and mouth out of water, fingers curved at the gunwale like a question mark. I take in my privileged breath and I fall down to peer in the small oblong windows, trying to find something to anchor me among murky undertow rivers, rivets, ripped fuselage metal that wishes a piece of me, wishes to tear open my femur.
Some of the men had been playing cards, gambling with each other, eating honeyed peanuts. The interior of the plane is an intimidating mess. Pearls, wood, wigs, shoes, and several yachting magazines float in oil and ooze. An arm sticking up here, an eye open there, my people crawling out of an intimate swamp, where life begins.
I stayed too long with my passengers, too long at the fair; I shoot to the surface in acute violence and try to get at my mundane breath. My head rings like a Woolco phone. The piping in my brain aches and pitches. I almost vomit but then I am all right, I am back in the iron pulsing world. Down again then, heels kicking at heaven.
Imagine those speedy moments of noise and ferocious lake water raging at you. This is you, your eyes, your punching hands, your muscled tender throat so suddenly deprived of air and jokes, your plane’s cabin a green blender on high. Imagine your quick range of expressions, your rubber face. In another city you paid someone for this seat, used your credit; will the bill come to your house before they find your body?
And as the plane hit the lake I stared curiously from the rails of my sunny dry deck, in my bathrobe and holding a calm mug of Earl Grey, Nick Drake’s gut-string on the stereo. My face did not change.
Now what was that I thought I just saw on the lake?
I squinted through pines and poplars (I spy with my little eye) knowing something big hit the freezing water but nothing else seemed to want to change; my sleepy world remained absolutely still, a breeze pushing hairs on my sunlit hand, a woodpecker searching a cottonwood for a beetle. Mallards preening and lifting in moronic duck panic at the plane’s impact and then settling again to perches, to placid waves.
You stand in a comfortable robe, and beneath still waters, at that exact second, this lightning ballet of writhing, clawing, climbing the modest pile. My men and women wrestling each other briefly, fighting, their sodden gone bodies enclosed in that floatplane the size of a chimney.
I was the last one to see them alive so the passengers became mine. I actually wanted to keep them. I ran to the boat. Down the steps I leaped, to help, to pull roughly on the mismatch oars, thinking of the plane as my possession, a prize, a hard secret thrill. But there are no prizes.
One body was at my fingers for an instant but I could not grip it. The body wanted to go back, seemed so heavy, a piece of pig iron wrapped in someone’s clothes. I leaned far out over the gunwale, my hands just on the slick body and in a fluid motion my blue rowboat plunged me, face and knees first, into the lake and on top of the unknown person, both of us thrashing and white and then I was wearing a boat on my head. I pushed at the boat and the water and then I saw the terrible face as it rolled in the foam, eyes crazy and mouth far too wide like a grotesque Haida war mask and I jumped to get away from it, kicking frantically at the shoulders, kicking at the drowned face.
Righting my rowboat I clambered aboard in an undignified panic to flee their spooky stadium, to bail like a madman with a jam tin. I lost the body and the body lost me. Maybe it was the jovial pilot with the southern accent, intimate with the front exit’s tiny silver latches. You get out of the plane but you don’t make it all the way to the top. Close but no cigar, just missed a lifetime supply of free oxygen. My body could be anywhere now, spiraling back down to the leeches and latches and mossy jackfish.
I no longer think of them as mine, not after actually seeing them dead and reinvented. Not after looking in the windows. They don’t look so good, no longer 100% human, and I don’t want this knowledge. You know what’s coming, you have the information, but nothing can prepare you. They saw it coming.
My swollen head hurts from diving and I feel I abandoned them, should have done more, found them faster. I expect melodrama, expect the floatplane to rear up like a shark at the surface, my dead disfigured passengers rising on a half-shell to point accusingly at me.
Why do I feel guilty?
I searched, I really did. I joined that pathetic club: those that really tried.
I rowed after all the others gave up the ghost, pulling back mightily on those creased creaking oars until clear fluid leaked from inside my hands: and one fine morning my passengers showed themselves to me: the glandular knowledge, the first body, the way we are at the end.
Best not to look at the face, the search and rescue people told the volunteers at the crowded pier. A person who drowns has the worst looking face you ever want to see, it can scare you, they warned. But how? I wonder. How do you not look at the face?
My Intended dials the numbers for me. To state where on our lake. To those who search, those that still have hope. Get that barge from up north, please lift them out of my liquid lake. I can’t drink tea. I can’t even phone it in, can’t look at my Intended’s face. Water starts acting on you, altering you. This lake I’ve been inside a million times.
My passengers stopped hiding, they gave themselves to me, but now I try to hide from what they give, from their faces, their wrestling, their information, their transformed skin, the way you hide from children years before they are born to you.
Each fall the Intended and I camp the east slope of the diamondback mountains, where rocks tremble like ancient citizens. There is no highway here. There are chocolate grizzlies. We zip our two sleeping bags together and hug, freezing. Bloodless owls and cuckoos over our heads watch blind meteors dissolve in mountain valleys to the west. Well after the war my father drove a Meteor. During the war my mother washed the bodies of the dead. Nursing the wounded, washing the corpses: this was a ticket out of Ireland. They say you marry your mother. In our thin tent my Intended listens to the last of the wild horses stomp past us. Bone-shadow horses and ragged feral cattle run crazily, stop, snorting heavily until spooked again, moving between mountains, between tents and time zones, scaring the couples. Stupid half-blind animals: a butterfly, an orgasm, can set them off. Or a patch of ground fog, and your father somewhere asking: Remember me.
I don’t know why, but here in the naked mountains I suddenly am certain my Intended is the one fooling around, cheating on me; it is not me at all bird-dogging or slipping around, to use c&w parlance. Oh the snakes crawl at night. I have a pain upon my forehead here; she innocently gives me a cold cloth to soothe it. Maybe when she was at all those foreign films. No one can watch that many images. She should make her own movies; we’d need a better camera. Light. We can read each other’s mind. She has a good eye, a private heart, a private heart I cannot always explain or understand but one I’m drawn to nonetheless.
My Intended has saved every card and letter I sent to her while I was on the road. It’s almost impossible to make it work when you’re always in different cities. Or even the same city. I’ve stopped counting the guys I know whose wives dumped them after they were
no longer a player. What will she think of me when I’m no longer a player? It’s the one small thing I have. We ran up some phone bills. For a while we were twins.
“I can’t imagine you doing anything else,” she said. “You’ve never had a nine-to-five job the whole time I’ve known you.”
Adapt, I’m thinking. My parents were immigrants. I have to adapt. I have to be a thermostat. I will weep in Paradise before this is over. I will be happy in spite of myself, if it kills me. When the moon is full I will slip a wallet full of cash beneath my pillow and hope it works.
Shirt Is Blue has not returned since his flight to dump manure over Cowtown. I hope he’s alive. I’m sure he’s lit out for his west coast island and airstrip. He’ll be back before I can drink all of his cloudy homemade lager. Maybe he’s lost at sea, another soul under still waters. Maybe, decades from now, they’ll find his big skeleton crashed in the scarred bush, like Bill Barilko of the Leafs. My Ex-Wife is always up the road, whipping her prize horses around the lunge line, coaxing amazing peppers and squash from her squared, black earth, her plateau above the lake. Moving white hair from her eyes, a hackamore on the grass, and that rat-faced horse the colour of an evening thunderhead. The well and trough in the high pasture seem dry but still the ancient wooden blades revolve in endless wind, shuffling clock gears and rust talcum. The mumbling farmers are on painkillers or they’re shooting their banker in the next town. The shaking hand, the crooked agent, the offshore boiler room scam, the patient decorative woman: this is our alma mater. We’ll arrange a reunion in 25 years. One advantage of growing older: the hate mail stops. But just about all correspondence other than bills stops. How long since champagne has been in my veins?
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