Waitress X says all’s fair in love and real estate. She says, One abandons the accordion, settles for questionable companions. What if you love a woman solely for her glowing eyes? Is it a sin? (They have prepared a net for my steps.) What if you would throw it away for her eyes? (My heart is fixed.) Her bow tie matches her eyes, drawing out prismatic colours. I don’t know her. How I want her. This is eating me from the fringes of my liver. I know nothing is enough. The eerie Montana highway, that one mountain off in solitude to the east—it is dear to me.
Low cloud over the lake’s polite waves and skinny birch ride the glowing mist, our sky haired with ravens. I can’t see thirty feet. Loons holler as moths beat at my lit picture window and logging trucks gear down in the hills; it’s noisy at night in my cabin under the firmament. I have retired in a sense to the lake, to the cabin’s earthy smell, to ska and blue-beat and 1950s country and western on an ancient reel to reel, to cattle skulls and seashells nailed on the pine wall; I have retired to Salvage King Ya! to what is left me. I will drive a school bus, work at 7-Eleven, shovel coal into trucks, do Joe jobs, anything.
I’ll catch on with another team.
Dream on, says Neon the helpful neighbour. Kathy drives a school bus every morning when school is in. It’s one of those stubby versions, maybe twelve seats, sixteen seats. I imagine her hunched over, racing a train, bombing down the road, blonde hair flying in her eyes, giggling as school kids bounce crazily off the waxed benches.
At the Slipped Disc Soirée Club, Neon sits in with the house band on blues harp, honking and mewling into a taxi dispatcher’s bullet mike. We shoot pool: money breaks, Iowa rules. Neon seems to be in trouble with a dealer acquaintance. He scored some coke on credit, the point being to make money to clear up a previous coke debt. But Neon does a pile himself and with friends, then buys a big German Shepherd as a guard dog. His fun new animal mounts the coffee table and knocks powder and Heineken reeling and what we could salvage from the wet shag did not dent the debts and they’re after my pal Neon. I’ve already lent him money. I can’t give him any more.
Shirt Is Blue says, My best dog got kicked by the stallion last night. One eye hanging right out.
Neon says, You take it to the vet?
Hell yeah I took it to the vet. He gives me a bill for a hundred and eighty dollars and a one-eyed dog.
Every day I remember the hockey player who lost his eye because of my shot from the point. I remember my ex-wife Kathy crawling out of the barn after her favourite horse kicked her in the breast. Her face contorted, blonde hair loose, trying to crawl away from her horse and trying to hold herself.
Kathy’s big horses glide past my cabin with heads only showing above the fog, like U-boat conning towers. Dawn clicks in over resident crows, several bald eagles, one hawk, one barred owl, one snowy owl, DDT eggshells and all these eyes in echoing light. Who needs sleep?
Shirt Is Blue gave up rodeo, at least gave up on rangy-tang broncs, after breaking his left leg and his pelvis. His big horse fell sideways, landing on his leg, all the weight rolling over, rolling, pulling him apart like a wishbone. At the Battle Creek Rodeo a stallion was acting up in his horse-trailer; Shirt Is Blue put his hand in to grab the bridle, and the horse chomped his hand like a sandwich, clear to the bone, infecting it. He remashed his ribs the next day. He still ropes calves though, practising under metal hangar roofs, big ears and big brows and coffee-coloured eyes under steel bolts and steel sheets, stays drinking cases of Labatt’s chemical beer until everyone else is gone. Shirt Is Blue hangs out with married women too much; goes through trucks like I go through shirts, like my teams go through new colour schemes and logos and sports psychologists and soft tissue experts.
Before the game I smear vaseline over my face. Less friction with the Vaseline, fewer cuts if I get in a fight or clipped by a stick. A brace on my left knee, swearing when a lace breaks. Kathy saw too much of this and got sick of it. My Intended hasn’t seen any of it.
Give the grinders credit, says the rookie coach, they’re not up on the scoreboard.
True, mumbles the goalie, they’re on waivers. Grinders of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your teeth. Red light on so often the goalie got sunburnt, hawhaw old joke. A streak goalie, butterfly style. “A smart smart goalie,” they say. “Too smart sometimes.”
Now what does that mean?
Listen, says the coach, dump the puck in—hit whoever the fuck touches it, all right? Got it? Hit. Finish the check. A beer a hit.
The Kansas City forward was on fire and they put him out with an axe. Our bus broke down in New Mexico and tequila was sixty cents a shot; bottles of tequila in Mexico when we slipped over the border were a buck. The K.C. forward had to stop, he lost too many partial plates throwing up into the big river.
Bep Guidlen was coaching. Better like beer, said Bep, ‘cause no hard stuff from now on. My head was on a swivel trying to watch their quicksilver wingers; my slap shot was not as good as it could be. I practised until I got an inflamed shoulder.
After the fight the waitress watched my eye change colour: jade, rose, purple. I loved the attention.
Slamming and screaming in the next condo. The Intended and I are interpreting signs: It is trendy again to beat women. I go out in the hall and am joined by the caretaker’s wife. Their cheque bounced earlier, she tells me. Walls and doors still shaking, she knocks, yells. “Everything okay in there?” Lame line, I know, but we have no training. The racket stops. When their door opens it becomes obvious the woman was beating the crap out of the man, and not vice versa. We are all sheepish, exchange small talk, wrist slappings. Why don’t they move? I seem to repeat this question everywhere I live.
The beautiful Waitress X laughs and says, “I’m sorry but I cannot take a hurricane named Bob seriously.” I love her because I don’t know her in the slightest. I want to kiss the lines at her eyes. No name for the colour of her eyes. I stare into them and they change. Gold and iron, mica, what? There seems to be light around her. She has a presence, a push and a pull. She makes me feel plugged into something fresh: exotic worlds flying past like asteroids peopled with waitress friends and after-hours staff parties and my fair share of ales and toxins. More than my fair share. And more than just the game of hockey. Her boyfriend Will the jock gambler may come at me any minute with his restaurant league baseball bat. Will will. Let him. This increases the joy somehow. It is a question of an offering to destiny versus just the next clam bake. Statues walk the wino cowtown park, pigeons on them beating like hearts.
He’s freaked me out a few times, Waitress X says, on the cafe’s deck. I don’t know what’s wrong half the time. He gets so angry. People ask, Has he done this before? Is he going to kill you someday? Are you leaving? Why don’t you leave? It’s hard to just leave. Job-wise things are bad for him. I’ve been telling him to get into something else.
She groans; her voice seems hoarser now.
There gets to be a point. I might’ve pissed him off. He didn’t call. He says I didn’t call. He says I’m being childish. He’s being childish. I hate him so much sometimes. I’m a little tired right now. Sorry. I hate him, then I start worrying. Is he all right? Is he going to do something crazy? It wears on you.
She pauses. This is great bread, she says.
Oh good, I say.
Looks like salt flecks on top. How’s your chowder? Is it all right?
Look over there, I say.
A TV news camera is panning the restaurant deck, panning us as background for a city story.
Oh great, I say, and Waitress X knows it’s the same TV station my Intended does freelance work for. Now I’ll be jumpy for days wondering if she’s seen the footage. We have to laugh, even though my stomach hurts.
I had a dream he was in a metal recliner like an iron dentist’s chair, Waitress X says. Maybe an electric chair. Pennies on his eyes. I worry he’s going to do something crazy. I ask him about his day and he says I ask too many questions. He’s got my car. We used to get along. Just fine. They become a different person; not the person you built them up to be.
Like me, I think to myself.
I should call the cops, she says, I could report the car stolen.
Her face looks troubled at this prospect. She says, But I don’t want it to get like that. I don’t think I should call the cops.
May’s annual snowstorm drops two feet and closes the Trans-Canada highway. Every May The Calgary Herald calls it a “freak” May snowstorm. How can it be “freak” when it happens every year? Summer starts to feel like a too-thin slice in a sandwich I can’t get my mouth around. No wonder our elders don white shoes and bunny-hop the links of San Diego half the year. My Intended waltzes into our living room, gazing out the picture window with her bright eyes, singing cheerily, LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW, then in a much lower voice: Fucking climate. Let’s move. Let’s pack up and sell everything and just go off to Mexico or somewhere warm.
Waitress X suddenly climbs a steel railing to the restaurant balcony and I realize she’s younger and in a different world than me. I hardly know what kind of music she likes; I don’t even know if she likes to dance. I’m the lamest dancer. The cook is juggling knives, smiling at her with his big gold teeth. This is her turf and I don’t belong. A parallel life in the same city blocks. Together we walk into the lounge side of her restaurant. A young bartender calls her by name, says, “Your breasts look nice today.” She laughs at him. She’s in a T-shirt and light light bra I just saw her clasp. I’m mad at the guy but don’t want to cause a scene; again, her turf, I’m forced to see we’re not really together. With waitresses and waiters I note a similarity to theatre people, they’re On’ a lot, a little loud, kisses, hugging, flirting, selling themselves as a doomed meringue. Waitress X is appetite while Kathy and my Intended are held back a little, more cautious, politic.
We’re in a showroom with no furniture: sun in the bay window, very hot, my mouth on her shirt, her hair, her hiked skirt, a tattoo circling her ankle, local juvenile cats and dogs sniffing under the door, wondering what we’re up to.
“Can you fit me in on your social calendar?” I’m getting sarcastic, a bad sign. Guys are always calling her up for lunch, drinks, as I did.
“I talk on the phone a lot and do my Jane Fonda and fool around with you. That’s all.” Today she had eight calls during her Fonda tape. She works the sundeck at 4:00 P.M.
“I dreamed about her,” she says.
She dreamed of my Intended.
“I touched her ass and boobs.”
Too bad women can’t have kids with women. Probably have a better race. I think her dream has changed things.
“I don’t want to destroy your marriage,” she says.
“We’re not quite married. We’re between marriages. The anti-marriage.”
“It’s inevitable she’ll find out.” This is likely true; we’re getting too brazen. I can only think of clichés: I don’t give a shit about marriage but don’t want to hurt anyone. Waitress X knows too many people. This is a fair-sized city but it’s more like a small town; soon we’ll run into someone who knows the Intended or knows me and they’ll see what’s what, be able to smell it on us, the green god of cheap illicit congress. There are some so sensitive they can’t go out to buy smokes without writing an epic poem about it. The implication always seems: I’m so much more feeling than the rest of you louts.