Shirt Is Blue is forever circling, he cannot crash. Like the ravens he will never die. I imagine him belly-flopping his Fokker by a beach on the Queen Charlottes, shacking up with a “lady doctor.” She has a pig named Pig and a horse named Lefty. A Jeep with two faces on the doors. My Intended will read Shirt Is Blue’s cards and letters out loud to me and our dozen kids: “People how you doing. Enclosing a few pictures of the animals. Lobster prices down. Cattle prices up. Been a good season here, keeping busy, got some good tunes too: Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Henry. Well I shut the drinking down, going on nearly two months. Party’s over. It sure as hell is time. Certainly’s been easier keeping myself in line and things on track. Christ I’m even roping better: Jackpot-roping this weekend, flying there, going to mail this in the big town or the big island, whatever. We plan to get over to Europe soon. Any chance of our paths crossing? With all good wishes.” Ravens they never die. Who said that?
PART 5
The Last Chapter (Nothing Up My Sleeve)
Gambling promises the poor what property performs
for the rich—something for nothing.
— George Bernard Shaw
Englishwomen’s shoes look as if they had been made
by someone who had often heard shoes described,
but had never seen any.
—- Margaret Halsey
CHAPTER 58
Lucky Ticket
1) DAYTIME: In a faux Polynesian lounge I grip my ex-agent in an amazingly effective headlock, simply wishing to demonstrate to him that it’s real, it’s not all on paper, that he has stolen money from me in a physical world.
“Touch me,” the agent manages to grunt into my armpit, “and I’ll keep you in litigation into the next century.”
His warning does make me pause. The courts can eat you and they don’t seem to appreciate violence. The courts believe they’re separate from the rest of us. So I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking even though too much thought wrecks enterprises of great pitch and then you’ve had the bun, or however Hamlet phrased it.
I decide to reach out and touch the agent. I hit his slender nose several times. He staggers away under the varnished bamboo timbers, holding his smooth face like an explorer. I am uneasily happy. Here is my reasoning, here is the method in my madness: I am gambling, gambling that he can’t actually afford any more lawsuits. I am betting on market forces, and in a self-centered way I am attempting, as a concerned private citizen, to settle out of court, to speed up the juices of due process. I think I see the start of a black eye on him already (actually it’s more green than black). I think I see the start of something beautiful: the start of an end.
2) NIGHT-TIME: The same leaves and prayers blow every midway; pure country music murmurs and one wonders about chance. A tanned and wrinkled cowboy lugs a hardwood crucifix through the heart of the Calgary Stampede. It’s a piece of work.
He says to me, to me alone, “Christ was not on the colour tee-vee taking poor people’s cheques; Christ did not come in brand names or with gold cards.”
The cowboy and I nod at each other with some uneasy understanding, although I do not actually possess a gold card.
“He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.”
I am skeptical but I hope this cowboy for Christ is right. I hope he’s right about temptation.
“He’ll hep you out all right,” he says, “just like He hepped me.”
Chuckwagons rock past in the mud. I have to come here every summer to realize my yearly quota of corn dogs and elephant ears, root beer and roller coaster nausea, to submerge myself in a crowded mackerel sea.
I remember last summer when Waitress X and I walked this Byzantine midway holding hands, lit, giggling like honest teens. Waitress X and I devoured a childhood memory: we ate about 6000 of those little donut deals cooking in batter; we stood staggered and laughing as the zeroes created themselves, laughing as we ate, laughing as we created ourselves for each other like performers and property, tiny flashfires in a chain without end, something precious and minuscule born right in front of my face, right under our disbelieving eyes. I had seen something.
Waitress X and I found our way onto the ferris wheel. Which will raise us up. Just before the top it stalled, and my stomach dropped, my stomach so grand with greased donuts. The ferris wheel jilting and jamming and jerking, the wheel ceasing to roll and we were propped, rocking nakedly, stuck nervously at the extreme top, sudden doubters about the whole collection of bolts. The city grid spilled light westward toward Bragg Creek and the jagged mountains, a beautiful evening tableau of sodium vapour and sandstone, Mars and stars at the end of your street.
This exact event, this stalling, occurred when I was a child on the wheel with my mother and my younger brother. My mother chattered brightly, telling us not to be scared. She admitted years later she was more terrified than we were, but she didn’t want us to be frightened.
On a wheel twenty years later Waitress X lightly touched a Swiss knife to my thigh.
“A little something to remember me by,” she said. Will I have to punch a woman, leap from this bucket, crawl to the seats below us?
“Oh relax,” she said, disappointed in me. “I’m just kidding.”
Far below on the dusty fairgrounds we spotted someone who looked a lot like her limping boyfriend, though it was hard to tell from up there. Chiaroscuro: clear and obscure. He began to run, three figures chasing him; he was pursued. I immediately thought of his gambling debts, his gambling on games. No idea, however, if this is the case, the cause. He deked nicely and shifted and circled around. He almost escaped them, their shoes.
They trapped him on dry-gilded grass behind a Guess Your Weight stall and at once they fell to him, their grim duty, their hard work. Dusty moths in the pretty evening. Mars and stars at the end of your street. Mars and Venus.
“Is that your boyfriend?” We hadn’t spoken for a minute, for months.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I don’t know. It’s somebody’s boyfriend.”
Now it’s yet another wheeling summer and carnies yell at me: “Hey guy! Win a prize for your wife! Buy a ticket on the new car, drive your wife around in something nice.”
Something in this spiel is bothering me and then I understand. A prize for your wife. My wife. He is mistaken. Very-soon-to-be-wife. Not yet. However, something central has altered my face, my posture, my haemochrome and marrow and bone structure: now I look married. And how do these canny carnies know I drive a beater? My car is old-world and retro—regal but still, a beater is a beater.
“Do you have your lucky ticket? Step right up!”
The sky is mallard-green, a touch of red where the eye would be. Our July sky lights up, spasms. A carny calls (a prize for your wife!) and briefly I imagine myself cut off from all that breathes and gambols and flings itself about, from all that seems life, seems free. I could flee as Neon has done, there’s expatriate hockey in Australia, there’s Switzerland and that woman I met in Hampstead Heath.
I pause.
I won’t flee. I’ll join the club, I’ll admit something. In slow motion, I join the restless populace, those summer petals on a bough that won’t break, those pedals on an Italian bumper car, loony citizens of the midway grinning madly at each other in their bumper cars, smashing into their closest neighbours without worry of barristers and agents and contusions. Many doubt me, but I will reform. No longer will I try people on like pairs of shoes, I will cease looking for the secret thrill of a double life, a triple life, a mouth to an ear. I will salvage what I can, pretend my life is a carburetor I can adjust at will. We hear love described and then we try to create it ourselves, force the issue. I am a human being, an animal apprentice. I carry civilizations, faces, legs, posture and power. My father’s thumb and my mother’s wink; the best and worst waiting in me. When my Intended nurses twins I will give her my Vitamin ? for her mouth-weary nipples, I will make gestures, make love, make toys, cut back on the booze, eat ca
rrots, change spots, (HA! I hear my Ex-Wife and several other women chorus: HA!) Without being a complete goof, I will display a seldom seen glimmer.
3) LAST TIME: I still recall flying in my pickup seven years earlier when I sped to wed Kathy, my calm former wife; I was humming nervous falsetto: Going to the chapel and I’m—Going to get married, floating a foot over the gravel like a Detroit chariot, furious pistons pumping, trying to get to church on time and practising the words I must tell the priest, must tell Kathy. In that strange light by the Conjuring Creek swamp all the bulls and horses became blood-red.
Do you take this blah blah blah?
“I do, I sure do,” I kept saying to myself inside the truck, practising, trying to sound suave and hip and relaxed but instead my voice sounded like Elvis hiccuping.
Then the engine blew big time, melting like a meteorite. I had to run SEVEN miles of gravel in city shoes and a rented monkey suit. My green truck, not wanting me married, lay in the ditch jealously weeping oil: a piece of jilted machinery. Perhaps it knew something of what lay ahead.
Those shoes bit at my feet. I ran.
Those shoes sandpapered my feet. I ran.
Most of those at the church gave up and left before I staggered up the steps, feet bleeding from friction, suit richly ruined with sweat fluids. Kathy was still there, looking unreadable. Everyone seemed to feel I blew the truck’s engine deliberately, as if I have some lucky rapport with lubricants and metal fatigue.
At the moment I am thinking of Kathy left waiting at the altar, I know she is hitting twenty-one at will in the midway casino, breaking the bank, smilingly welcoming poker chips into her umbrage, her dream kingdom.
My Ex-Wife is among the gamblers. The chip-runners have photo ID pinned to their shirts. Kathy smells of soap and roses and earth; Kathy’s luck is excellent, no more bad juju. The rookie chip-runners bring more piles of chips, in the knowledge they will all soon be hers.
4) THIS TIME: Here at the big fair with my old childhood friends, Dog Boy and The Bearded Lady, here under the glittering wheel and the routine rotation of galaxies, here among the shills and rubes, geeks and good people, I grab onto my Intended’s pretty arm. My Intended is breathing, taking streaked hair from her face, teeth showing, looking at me, looking away and looking at me. I say her name. Everything is alive and teeming, waves of people screaming on the Tilt-O-Whirl, the Wild Mouse, greased machines singing to us each to each.
“Do you have your lucky ticket?” they demand savagely. I’m not really sure.
“Are you willing to take a chance?”
Well sure I am. Is there any choice? I’ll take a chance. I’m gambling the agent won’t sue the pants off me and mine. And I’ll take a chance on my Intended if she’ll still take a chance on me. Now I know the colour of each of her eyes, my Intended’s eyes. But do I know what’s what?
We pay strangers and bend our bodies into the Yo-Yo and the Zipper, the Zipper and the Tunnel of Love and the Doppel Looper and the Wall of Death. We strap ourselves in open cages and from the floor’s fresh straw rise pell mell into the blurred barreling descent.
I’m pursuing my cells and my Intended’s cells, pursuing Waitress X or the yellow-haired Kathy, never catching where I was, where she’ll be in a moment, where we have already vacated. It’s a useless inevitable chase. Movement and gravity wrench the carnival light out of its usual lock-step logic and into juddering Kodak stripes, fused halos, fiery jets of zigzag colour. G forces and gravity wrench my eye fluids and jaw south.
These are not ordinary moments, I’m thinking. Head tides move swiftly through this private theatre of shifting molecule actors, a flesh doll house juggled around and around and up and down, up and down, foreign engines throwing us through barrel rolls and flips of longing.
5) NO TIME: The carnival ride calms, crawls. The way up is the way down. Tattooed musclemen welcome us back to summer’s lovely earth and we climb from their cages on sea legs. On wonky shoes we climb out, craving less, giddy sons and daughters of diesel, knowing something, knowing something of the price of motion and happy just to stop a while.
THE END
Mark Anthony Jarman’s fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, the Western Magazine Award, the O. Henry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has appeared in Best Canadian Stories. His story collection, 19 Knives, won the ReLit Award and enjoyed wide critical acclaim. Born in Edmonton, Jarman attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches fiction at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
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