by Ivan Coyote
I shrugged and smirked back at him, saying nothing.
“You realize a woman’s love is like a fly?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “And just like a fly, her love is just as likely to land on a pile of shit as it is a rose.” He took out his hanky, blew his nose, and stuffed it into the front pocket of his trousers. “What I mean is, don’t ask yourself why a beautiful girl might love you, just be glad she picked you to love. It’s good to love a girl older than you, in the long run it is like your old Valiant: if it is too young and beautiful, you may or may not ever get where you are going, and besides, what has it cost you to get there? The shirt off your back, that’s what, young man, that’s what. Comprendes?”
I didn’t really get what Anton was saying, but I could tell that it was important to him that I did, so I nodded.
“You know my Camilla was ten years older than me? My only sadness, my single regret, is that she is without me now, for a while, up in heaven.” Anton crossed himself, and I followed, as taught by my grandmother. He went on. “There never was a better wife for me than Camilla. I never worried where Camilla was. If she had been ten years younger, maybe it would be a different story, you see? It is a smart young man who marries an older woman.”
Anton held up one finger for me to wait a moment, and he shuffled up his back stairs into his pantry off the kitchen. He came back with a jar of stewed tomatoes. “Camilla canned these. You take them; it’s one of the last jars I have. You cook a nice meal for that girl; she is a real catch, and I watched how she looked at you. She loves you, and you are a lucky man for it. You cook for her, you hear me? I’ve watched them come and go over the years. This girl, there is something about her. She has a kind of grace; my Camilla, she had it too.”
This was the most Anton had ever said to me all at one go, and his eyes were tearing up. He fumbled for his hanky with one hand and shooed me off home with his other. “And wash your damned car. It’s covered in mud. You take care of it. It’s a good car.”
FISH STORIES
I don’t know why I love fish stories, but I love fish stories. The one that got away, the one that didn’t, how big it was and how feisty, and how you cooked it and how everyone said it was the best they ever had. And I love fishing, that combination of true relaxation and every-cast-could-land-you-a-big-one excitement known only to the angler. I love how your sweater smells like campfire and fish blood and lake water and wind when you get home, and after all that, you get to come home and tell fish stories.
So they call him Joe Fish, although I don’t believe that is his legal name, Joe Fish is what they call him, on account of how much he loves to fish. I met him telling fish stories in that little corner store-sandwich bar place under the Skytrain cut, between the Vietnamese hair salon and the drop-off laundry place. An unlikely strip in an unlikely spot, it is where I most like to drink coffee. Even though the proprietor refuses to get an espresso machine (he maintains it keeps the film guys from coming in), it is my drip coffee hang-out of choice, mostly on account of the old men and their fish stories.
Fish stories are not always only about fish, you see.
Joe Fish is a soul fisherman, like I was when I was a little gaffer. Rain or shine, war or peace, starving or stuffed; any fishing is better than none. By the time most of our alarm clocks go off he is on his way back into town with the catch of the day, just on time to drop by the old sandwich bar for a bowl of tomato vegetable and black coffee with Sweet’n’ Low, and a few fish stories.
Joe and I, we’re the morning crowd. ’Round about coffee time, the male nurses who work at the old folks home next door all parade in for BLTs and a few quick smokes and the talk turns maybe to politics, or taxes, or what a freak George Dubya is, how his eyes are too close together like some kind of warthog or something, and that’s about when Roger the Rascally Rabbit shows up. At first I didn’t know why a seventy-nine-year-old man would land a nickname like that, but then I sat next to him at the sandwich bar, and we got to telling Roger’s version of fish stories. Roger has shrapnel in his head and his right hip, and the pills take care of the grand mal seizures he gets since he fought in Korea, but he gets these little ones, smells weird things, gets fuddled up, but not since he started smoking pot.
“Here I am,” he says, pulling out two baggies from the Compassion Club, “with a half-ounce of medical grade weed in my pocket, and all I feel like doing is popping home for a shot of rye. Go figure.”
Roger the Rascally Rabbit used to be an electrician. He has outlived both of his children and his marriage. Fish stories.
The other day, Joe Fish brings in this buddy of his. I had just got back from the Yukon and had some new fish stories of my own, and so we all get to talking. Joe’s buddy is named Mike, he’s seventy-eight and looks maybe sixty, a real spry fella. I told them I was on my way back from camping in Squamish, where the Chinooks are running.
“Which river?” Mike asks. “The Cheakamus or the Chuckanut?” Mike knows the country. Paradise Valley. He figures I’m okay, he likes me all right, I know his stomping grounds.
“The best whore that ever worked in Squamish lives out near there,” Mike says. “I should take you to meet her. She’s retired now, but she still makes the best apple pie I ever had, and I always really had a soft spot saved for her. A real good ol’ gal.” He winks at me. I think he thinks I’m a young guy, but I’m not sure. I smile and wink back, sincerely, thinking of all the whores I’ve loved, and we drink coffee in silence for a while. Mike is looking kinda sentimental, so I have to ask him.
“What was her name, Mike? The best whore that ever worked in Squamish, what was her name?”
Mike wrinkles his nose and shakes his head slowly. “You know, I cannot for the life of me remember her name. That’s the thing about getting old that fools you: you think you’re only going to forget stuff that doesn’t really matter, but that’s not what happens at all. You just forget.”
Jeff the owner jumps up and unplugs something, just as Connie the Junkie comes in for smokes. She goes over to the pay phone, picks it up, listens, slams it back down. “Jeezus, when they gonna come fix this thing?”
Jeff shrugs sympathetically. “I called ’em, told ’em it’s broke, but who knows with those guys.”
Connie leaves. Jeff plugs the pay phone back in again. “I feel bad, but I can’t have her sitting on the edge of my sandwich counter doing business.”
“You are perfectly right. A fella can’t eat his sandwich with that kind of activity sat right down beside you.” Roger the Rascally Rabbit is shocked by Connie and her scabby legs and bruises, as are we all. “She should know better. This is a family establishment we got ourselves here.”
We all nod into our styrofoam cups, watch the traffic. Tell stories.
[THERE]
TRICK ROAD TRIP
It’s not just the leopard skin fun fur. No, it’s not just that. Bed in the back attack, four inches of foam under your dome kick back, four speakers, and no lack of foot room. Four doors, too, and genuine pine tongue-in-groove ceiling, say what, tongue-in-groove ceiling, it’s what they call custom-fitted for comfort. I’ve got Christmas lights on the dash that run off of AAs, a CD player, and a red bean bag ashtray. Oh yeah.
Number 99 southbound. Please remove sunglasses when driving through tunnel. If you leave leftover Chinese food on the engine cover, it will be warm by the time you get stuck in traffic. It is the art of the road trip and this is what you call a nuance. A fundamental being the company you keep.
Riding at my side is the naughtiest pretty boy I know, with a fresh haircut and eyelashes that should be illegal. Stacked boots and brand new blue jeans that bulge in all the right directions. I never could resist a lad like that; I would have made a terrible lesbian.
Aretha reminds me of Gil Scott-Heron because the revolution will not be televised which reminds me to put on television, the drug of a nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation and the Disposable Heroes take us through the border where we are greeted by
a boy scout who welcomes us to America and makes sure we have enough ice and rolling papers. “Remember to ensure that your campfires are properly put out.” He salutes us and we pull out for Bellingham.
There’s an exit in the pass, I don’t know the number but I could show you, and at the Texaco station is an espresso and sandwich bar manned by a shorn-headed angel who offers you three kinds of cheese if you have short hair like hers, if you know what I mean, so we fill up and let the dog out for a pee.
There is not a cloud in the sky and pine trees line the highway, the sun strobes between them as we sail past exit seventy-five and still alive, damn this thing runs fucking great since I switched to high octane.
There’s a place called Friday Creek that marks halfway from Vancouver to Seattle and we change the CD to commemorate its passing. I still believe in Dr Hook. I started in my dad’s ’49 Ford when I was five, and why stop now? I’m not a bad person, I don’t drink and I don’t kill, I got no evil habits, and I probably never will, please, now don’t misunderstand me, it’s not love I’m tryin’ to buy, it’s just I got all this here money, and I’m a pretty ugly guy ... but I got more money than a horse has hair, cuz my rich old uncle died, and answered all my prayers....
Nathan and I decide to do a big drag number to honour the time-worn brilliance of Dr Hook and then flip to kd lang’s version of Steve Miller’s “The Joker” because we’re nearing Seattle and I’m thinking of peaches. We call ahead to make sure she’s ready.
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as her peaches, abundant and too much for one hand and she is packed and waiting, sparkling on her sidewalk in the sun. She always stops my breath like that, the first time every time, it’s like that with me and her. She has cooked potato salad and made iced tea and we throw it in the cooler. She slips me a little tongue and takes the back seat.
We have sleeping bags and flashlights and a blow-up raft and fishing rods and a propane heater, and we are headed for the desert. It is high noon Easter morning and the whole world is a cherry blossom.
Life was almost perfect, until yesterday when I found a black polyester shirt with yellow and red sparkly flames all over it, and now it is sublime.
I have never seen the Grand Canyon, purple mountain majesty, and I need to hear the artist formerly known as because she reminds me of something James used to say: I like ’em fat, and I like ’em proud, you got to have a mother for me so move your big ass ’round this way, so I can work on that zipper baby, cuz tonight, you’re a star, and I’m the big dipper.
Nathan stretches, puts his new boots on the dash, and winks at a trucker as we drive out of his shadow. I smile at her in the rearview mirror. She is tinted afternoon orange by this four o’clock light. Looks like we’ll be in Portland in time to watch the sun go down on all those bridges.
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER
How many trips up this highway? The bliss that pumps in my blood the moment my wheels turn towards home, how my heart smiles when the pavement turns to chipseal turns to gravel.
It is my ritual, the bringing down of the cooler, the shaking out of the sleeping bags. How do the dogs know? They don’t wait by the door like this when I clean out the closet or gather the laundry.
They must know we’re headed north.
I never need much of a reason to go home. This time it was just a postcard.
“I’ve got the camper fixed up and the truck is tuned and ready to go,” my grandmother wrote in her perfect, old-lady script. “If you don’t come up and go camping with me soon, we’ll regret it for the rest of our lives. Or should I say, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
Once a Catholic, always primed for a guilt trip. I checked the calendar, and the bank account. I’d have to be back in two and a half weeks: four days home, four days back. A little over a week there. If I could find my Louis L’Amour books on tape, I could be on the road by four o’clock.
This is why I don’t keep houseplants.
I stopped briefly in the low brush just outside Hope to pick some sage for the dash. Smells great when you turn on the heater in the morning. Avocado and asiago cheese sandwich on rye bread, and mandarin juice in a can. I let the dogs out. The husky does some calisthenics and yawns, sniffs around my feet for crumbs; the little guy chases mosquitoes. The city is just an unnatural glow in the sky behind us.
We hit the road as soon as the kinks are stretched out of my legs. I was pushing to make it just past Williams Lake, to my secret camping spot. Last time, orange surveyor’s tape was wrapped around the trees in the clearing, and the road had been widened, but I was hoping it hadn’t changed yet. I wanted to wake up next to a lonesome sparkling lake and the sound of loons.
I was up just before dawn; the dogs were barking. The windows were fogged up, but I could still see her and her baby before they lumbered into the brush. Bears. Good thing I decided against pitching the tent in the dark. There was frost on the windshield and a thin frozen film in the dog water. I figured I’d stop for coffee somewhere else.
Early September is the best time to hit the Alaska Highway. Most of the motorhomes have turned around to take the grandkids back to school, and you can still beat the night.
You leave Vancouver in late summer. You drive ten or twelve hours a day for four days. The days get longer the further north you go. If you haul ass as the day is waning, you can chase the light; that is, you can drive through an extended sunset, one that happens longer for you in your moving car than it does for any stationary person watching from the back deck. In September, the sky is still orange in Fort St John long after the porch lights have come on in Prince George. Autumn is a fast-forward blur of yellow poplars and emergency orange birch trees. You don’t watch the leaves fall, you drive to a place where they’re already gone.
I started to get sleepy the third afternoon. Nina Simone and the smell of sage lulled me into the willows, the road a dusty zipper up the belly of a sleeping, tree-covered beast. I pulled into a campground, crawled into the back, and crashed.
I woke up to the smell of wood smoke, and stumbled out, fuzz-mouthed, into my little campsite.
“Whatcha git me for my birthday?” She was gravel-voiced and full of belly laughs.
I spun around to see who had spoken. Much had happened during my two-hour nap. The campsite next to me now held a dilapidated trailer that looked like it couldn’t take one more move, and she was parked on a faded lawn chair beside it. “I said, where is my birthday present, sonny?”
She was talking to me, her brown eyes sparkling above raisin-wrinkled cheeks and beneath silver braids. Her legs were spread wide to make room for her belly, and she had two wooden canes slung over the arm of her lawn chair. She spat tobacco juice through the hole where her two front teeth had been and winked at me.
“So how old are you?” I asked, because it seemed the obvious thing.
She was waiting for it. “I am eighty-two years old. So whatcha bring me?” She laughed and coughed, and slapped her knee. “Come have a beer with me. Bring my present.”
I grabbed my penny whistle out of the bag on the front seat. “I didn’t buy you anything this year – I mean, what do you get the woman who has everything?” I gestured around us, to the muddy river, the spindly pines, and the smoking campfire. “So I wrote you a song.”
I played her a jig, or maybe it was a reel, I can never tell the difference, and she heaved herself out of the lawn chair, planted one cane in the dust and jigged (or was it reeled?) herself in a circle with the other cane. Her tongue stuck out of one corner of her smile, and we kind of hop-danced together like that for a while, until the dust rose around us and beads of sweat popped in the maze of lines on her forehead.
She collapsed back into her squealing lawn chair, still laughing from down in her belly, and motioned to the chair next to her. “Richie, get this” – she narrowed a wizened gaze at my chest, then up to my throat – “new friend of mine a beer, would ya? Make yerself useful. My name is Rosie. Everyone calls me Gr
andma.” She banged on the door of the trailer with the worn rubber tip of her cane. “Richie, you gone deaf in there?”
A scruffy looking fellow in his late twenties shuffled out of the trailer with a Budweiser for me. “Hey, I’m Richard.” He extended his hand tentatively, like he didn’t expect anyone would actually shake it, his head cocked a little to one side.
“Thanks, but no.” I took his hand in mine, and left the beer. “I’ve got to drive.”
“So what?” they both said in unison.
“It’s only American beer,” Grandma added, a frown gathering around her mouth. “Have a beer with an old lady on her birthday. Maybe it’s my last. Who knows, eh?”
Rosie and my grandmother should get together. They could talk me into anything.
Halfway through my warm Budweiser, a primer-coloured truck belched into the campground and backed into Rosie’s little driveway, a load of firewood heaped so high I couldn’t see who was in the front seat, until they came piling out.
A stocky man jumped from the driver’s side and began directing the swarm of youngsters where to stack the firewood. He lit a smoke and strutted over to Rosie, kissed her cheek.
“Happy birthday, Mum. Richie, get up off your ass and get your father a beer. I’m Dennis,” he said curtly to me, raising his cowboy hat. Dennis sported a Mack Truck belt buckle and veins wrapped around his forearms like ropes. Amazingly white teeth shone like a billboard in the middle of his brown face. “You got a name?”
“Yeah, sorry ... I’m Ivan.”
Dennis snorted, looked me up and down, cracked his beer with the thumb of the hand he held it in, and turned his gaze to his son. “This your new girlfriend, Richie?”
Richard swallowed, looked down, and said nothing.
“You from down south then?” Dennis leaned back on the heels of his boots and squinted at the license plate on my car.